053: Aja Evans – Overcoming Trauma at the Intersection of Mental Health & Money

Aja Evans is a board-certified therapist, speaker, and writer who is focused on financial well being. After ten years in a mental health practice, she noticed the emotional impact of how people interact with their money, especially black people. She saw reflections of her own journey to financial literacy and her own reckoning with her relationship with money and sought additional training.

Today, Aja joins the show to share how she has made assisting people at the intersection of mental health and money a pillar of her work.

📺 Watch on YouTube

https://youtu.be/KKtqSn-42jI

Key Takeaways

00:58 – Jonathan introduces today’s guest, Aja Evans, who joins the show to discuss her earliest memories of money and entrepreneurship and her path to becoming a financial therapist

09:42 – Accumulating debt versus not saving money

13:56 – Unfortunate financial statistics surrounding the black community

25:34 – Aja speaks to how she works with financial advisors

29:07 – Financial anxiety

32:24 – Money, guilt, shame, and secrecy

35:52 – Generational wealth

39:25 – How Aja works with her clients on their financial stress

43:42 – One piece of financial advice to heed and one thing to completely ignore

47:13 – Aja talks about her upcoming book

47:53 – The last thing Aja changed her mind about and the one question that Aja would want to know the answer to

50:32 – Jonathan thanks Aja for joining the show today and lets listeners know where to connect with her

Tweetable Quotes

“I was going into debt and feeling really awful about myself and awful about my money because I just did not understand how I could be making what I felt like was so much money, and not be able to afford my lifestyle. And that was the first time that I really had to have a financial reckoning with lifestyle versus how much income you have and what does that look like and where does it come from.” (08:04) (Aja)

“I didn’t really have any direction, I think is the best way to put it, in terms of what I was trying to do. It was a lot of looking at how people were paying off debt, whether that was debt snowball or avalanche, it was just the stories of people. So, it wasn’t necessarily, ‘Hey, here are each of the steps.’ It was the stories that people were paying off debt and how interesting that was. And I just realized that people weren’t talking about it and felt really bad about it.” (13:04) (Aja)

“When it comes to the black community, historically there haven’t been as many opportunities to create wealth. And, because of that, that means that there isn’t as much wealth to be passed on. That is not to say that there are not black people who are extremely wealthy; there are. But, as an overall collective as a population, we have less wealth than our white counterparts.” (15:37) (Aja)

“What I have found is that people want to be making more money. They want to grow their wealth. It is either a matter of they don’t know how to, or they aren’t getting the opportunity to get some of the jobs that might allow them to get to that point.” (21:09) (Aja)

“We are not navigating money as if it’s something that we all have to navigate. That taboo, that secrecy, the potential jealousy of deciding who somebody else is because they do or do not have money. Deciding what value they have because they do or don’t have money. I think people have assigned a lot of meaning to money when money doesn’t care. Money has no feelings about us.” (31:11) (Aja)

“Figure out what you need to feel [financially] stable. I say that because a lot of times what people don’t realize is that what they’re looking for is a sense of stability and they don’t know how to get it.” (44:01) (Aja)