You return something and mentally reallocate the refund before it reaches your account. You bought the concert tickets in February, so by September the evening feels free. You weigh an expensive coat against how often you’ll wear it, what it replaces and whether you can afford it this month.

There’s a lot happening in those calculations: timing, trade-offs, usefulness, pleasure. Women have been doing this financial thinking for years, often while keeping track of everyone else’s needs too. Girl math made some of that running commentary audible, with enough humour to get it passed around the group chat. For a financial industry wondering how to get women interested in money, that should prompt a useful question: how much of what women were saying has it simply failed to hear?

Financial guidance so often arrived as the same dry instructions about spending less, saving more and deciding what else to give up. Sharing our experiences online, we began with the decisions already occupying our minds. We found ways to discuss them that sounded like ourselves, and made room for other women to join in.

Mental Accounting and the Education We Gave Ourselves

The idea that women need help with the basics of money has a long history. Even the pictures in money articles suggested we couldn’t be trusted with the grown-up stuff.

A 2021 study by Starling Bank and Brunel University examined 600 financial images and found women were nearly four times as likely as men to be depicted as childlike with money. Apparently, adulthood came with a salary, responsibilities and a piggy bank to hug. Against that backdrop, there’s something satisfying about women making their own financial thinking the subject of the joke, on their own terms.

Behavioural economists call the sorting of money into different mental pots “mental accounting”. Girl math gives that familiar behaviour a social life. Someone describes the calculation behind a purchase and other women recognise their own reasoning, compare approaches or question the logic.

Send that video to a friend and you’ve started talking about how money fits into your life. There’s room to explain a choice, change your mind or ask what someone else would do. That’s a useful starting point for genuine financial education that meets women where they are.

How Loud Budgeting Takes the Shame Out of Spending

That openness has a practical use when other people get involved in your spending.

There’s a particular skill involved in telling a restaurant table that you don’t want to split the bill equally, especially when you had pasta and someone else had a small aquarium. You know your budget; you’d just like to explain it without turning dessert into a discussion of your financial circumstances. Financial education would traditionally have offered you a pie chart. Loud budgeting gave us the words.

Being open about what you’ll spend and why lets you decline the expensive weekend because you’ve got other plans for your money, without inventing a dental emergency. Anyone who’s watched a birthday dinner develop into a three-night European itinerary knows the value of having those words ready.

A budget becomes easier to stick to when you can discuss it with the people making plans around you. Being able to say it out loud is part of putting financial knowledge to work. Once spending limits are open for discussion, so are the priorities behind them. If you’re wondering what soft saving is, it asks how much of today we want to give up for tomorrow.

It makes room to ask whether every spare pound must be saved and every spare hour put to work. The side hustle for your side hustle can wait. Perhaps Sunday afternoon could survive without a revenue target. Those questions give a financial plan what it most needs: an honest account of the life someone wants to lead. Enjoyment, time and breathing room belong in that discussion, alongside security in later life. When we talk about these choices, the industry gets a clearer picture of what matters to us, what’s hard and where we need help.

Finance Joins In

In etoro’s Loud Investing podcast, Sarah Glanville and Tash Leared begin with the cultural references, personal experiences and questions that already come up between friends. They talk about investing with the ease of colleagues who’ve slipped out for coffee.

The opening episode asks whether Miranda Priestly would invest in Hermès, and The Devil Wears Prada leads into company shares and patience. Inflation gets a Freddo reference. Familiar ground gives the explanation somewhere to start. Tash also recalls asking friends at university about the crypto they were discussing. They suggested she do her own research. Later, her brother sat down and explained what he was investing in, helping her get started. Her interest was already there. Being taken seriously helped her act on it.

A person asking about investing is already participating. The response she receives can make it easier to ask the next question, or leave her wondering whether she should have kept quiet. “We work in investing, but you don’t have to,” Tash says in the introduction. You’re welcome before you know the terminology. Girl math and the talk that followed gave us room to speak freely about money. Finance can build on that by taking our experience seriously and making the next question welcome. Speak like a person. The group chat has been doing it for years.

Listen to the Loud Investing podcast here. Be part of etoro's Loud Investing learning, visit etoro.com/loudinvesting. Investing involves risk. Not investment advice.

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