Do you know exactly where your money goes each month?
If the answer is no, but you want it to be yes, money coach and book author Ashley Feinstein Gerstley offers a simple and easy-to-follow guide to finally get your finances in order.
Modeled after the popular food cleanses that many people do to remove harmful toxins from their bodies, Feinstein Gerstley’s book “The 30-Day Money Cleanse” walks readers through the necessary steps to create a healthier and happier personal relationship with their money.
“We don’t usually associate ‘easy’ with finance, do we? But that’s my goal,” Feinstein Gerstley says. “When people come to me, they usually have a goal or a problem, which ranges from ‘I don’t know how to get out of debt,’ or ‘I want to buy a house,’ or ‘I want to send my children to college,’ or ‘I want to save.’
“One of the things I hear over and over is, ‘I’m not living a frivolous lifestyle, I’m not going on shopping sprees, I’m not taking extravagant trips, but I don’t know where my money is going. It’s just always gone,’” she says.
Keep a money journal
For many, the first step to finding financial clarity and stability means keeping a money journal to track their spending.
“It sounds simple, but for some people it’s the worst thing they could have to do,” Feinstein Gerstley explains. “Usually, the worse it sounds, the more we have to gain from it.”
In addition to tracking spending with a money journal, she advises taking inventory of all of your earnings and writing down how much debt you have, including minimum payments due and their due dates. It’s the only way to really understand your current financial situation and work toward a plan to becoming debt-free.
“One thing I think is really scary for people to do is get out there and face it and really see what you have, but it’s a really powerful step,” Feinstein Gerstley says. “Managing your money is simple, but it isn’t easy.”
How she became The Fiscal Femme
Despite a finance degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and working multiple years in the financial trenches, Feinstein Gerstley readily admits to stressing over her personal finances and not knowing how to make smart money decisions for herself.
“I worked as an investment banker and in corporate finance, but I didn’t know anything about my own money or how to figure it out,” she says, especially as she moved from banking to corporate finance and no longer enjoyed those exciting banking bonuses. “I was bleeding through my own money.”
Recognizing the need to make some major changes in how she handled her money, Feinstein Gerstley — in what she describes as her “typical Type A way” — dug in and started researching available options. The materials she found were dry, daunting and too complicated for most people to follow.
“Most of the things I found or read were written for and by older white men,” she says. “I was adapting things to work for me, and I wanted to share things in my own voice.”
Feinstein Gerstley started writing The Fiscal Femme blog in 2012, which led her to becoming certified as a money coach and starting her own business, The Fiscal Femme. She’s now a trusted money expert who’s been featured by Forbes, NBC, Glamour, the New York Times, among others.
Empowering women (and men)
The mission of The Fiscal Femme, Feinstein Gerstley says, is to show women how much more power and freedom they gain by becoming financially well. As a self-described feminist, she believes financial wellness creates equality for women by giving them more power to negotiate jobs, leave negative life situations or invest in causes they believe in.
“Women actually have more debt than men,” the Hoboken, N.J.-based money coach says. “The debt that’s usually stressing them out is credit cards, student loans and personal loans. I do tend to attract more of a female audience, but I work with men, too, and a lot of couples. I really believe my program will work for anyone.”
While she created The 30-Day Money Cleanse as an online personal finance course about five years ago, she decided to publish “The 30-Day Money Cleanse” book in January 2019, based on the success and popularity of the online course. She recently created a music parody video of Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” as a way to show how much more powerful it is to save money, rather than glorify today’s acquisition culture.
“One easy personal finance hack that nobody tells us is: It’s already more than enough or it’s never going to be enough,” Feinstein Gerstley says. “It’s a hack to let go of the rat race and escape acquisition culture. It’s permission to stop keeping up with the Joneses.”
The power of living debt-free
Feinstein Gerstley says most people stress over their finances because they never learned financial literacy in school and they don’t really understand how credit cards work or what carrying a balance on those credit cards actually cost them.
Add in the convenience of today’s technology — paying for things with your phone, taking an Uber to get where you need to go or asking Siri to place your Amazon order — and you’ve got the perfect storm for poor money management skills.
“Technology has made things convenient, but it also makes it really easy to spend money and not feel like we’re spending money,” she says. “In The 30-Day Money Cleanse, I recommend only using cash. For most of us, using cash feels a lot more painful.”
Before starting her own business, Feinstein Gerstley discovered the power of living debt-free by following the “cash-only” advice for purchases. She also started a savings account she deemed, “Project Freedom,” which ultimately allowed her to leave her full-time job and start her own self-funded company.
“When you’re really excited about starting something and going out on your own, it makes it really easy to let go of the other expenses in order to have that,” she says. “I came to understand the less I spend, the more my money would last and the faster I could go out on my own, so that’s what made it really motivating.
“I walk the walk, 100 percent,” Feinstein Gerstley says.
