I had my first chat with a financial advisor over hushed tones at work. Now, I'm helping other women find the confidence I lacked.

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• Katie Gatti Tassin is the host of "The Money with Katie Show" and author of a financial newsletter.
• Her book, "Rich Girl Nation: Taking Charge of Our Financial Futures," is a financial guide for women.
• This is an adapted excerpt from her book, out this month.

"Great, Katie, I've got Zach, who's in training, on the line for this call and I'll be stepping in to fill an advisory role," assured the deep voice booming out of my phone.

I reflexively squeezed the button on the side to lower the volume. Self-conscious that people in the surrounding cubicles would hear my conversation, I slipped into a nearby fishbowl phone alcove and slid the glass door closed behind me with a force that revealed my unfamiliarity with my new workplace's meeting rooms.

Enclosed in the small, transparent nook, I settled into one of the cloth spinning chairs, stationed so I could look out at the passerby. Only a few months into my first full-time job, I was trying to figure out what to do with a steady paycheck. Most of my efforts felt more like LARPing adulthood than actual progress. I cleared my throat after an awkward pause. "Sure, Jake, that sounds great," I said, trying a little too hard to sound comfortable.

"So, Katie," Zach began, with equally forced bravado, "what are your financial goals?"

"My financial goals?" I paused, considering a question that would've felt completely absurd only three months ago when I was still making minimum wage. "I guess I'm just trying to . . .figure out how much I can save every month?" I asked back. Another long pause. Does anyone on this call know what's going on? I wondered.

I noticed two older men, both of whom occupied conspicuous leadership positions in my department, conferring in the dining area outside the fishbowl. I became suddenly embarrassed at the thought of them hearing my faltering side conversation with two financial advisers, as though I had been caught playing dress-up in my mom's clothes. This is what adults do, right?

Talk to financial advisers? Again, a question.

"Well," I continued, my frustration with the entire ordeal transmuting into confidence, I already know enough to know that I don't know what I'm doing. I just need to know how much I should save."

"Right!" Zach chirped. "Why don't you get back in touch when you know about your financial . . . situation?" And thus concluded my first bewildering call with a financial adviser in the summer of 2017.

My question was simple, but it went unanswered

The men on the phone were calling from a firm I now know to be more in the business of insurance sales than financial services. I didn't understand at the time why, in their position as financial professionals, they were unable to answer what was — to me — a simple money question: How much should I save? I had accepted their invitation to the conversation in an earnest effort to go through the motions of being an adult, skeptical that I hadn't been asked to pay for it ("How do you make money?" I had asked, oblivious to both the industry and obvious social convention).

Unsatisfied, I returned to my desk and pulled up a half-hearted attempt at a Mint budget I had created using Intuit's now-defunct, clunky-but-free online spend tracking software. As I scrolled through my budgets, I wasn't sure I even knew what I was looking for. One hundred dollars a month for eyelash extensions? That's not that much, is it? Budgeting felt like writing your own rules and then leaving them up to yourself to enforce. What would happen if I made a shit budget? Even if I followed it perfectly, wouldn't the outcome still be shit? More than anything, I didn't really understand the point of tracking this information or determining how much to save. For the time being, I put my concerns on the back burner.

A knowledge gap is keeping women from achieving financial freedom

Being confused about money (and about how my friends afforded to attend an always-on rotation of music festivals in our early twenties) just felt like an adult rite of passage — but even if I wasn't talking to people about money explicitly, it was always present in the subtext of my interactions with my single and coupled friends alike. One thing was obvious: The men tended to default to the driver's seat in the couples, and the refrain I heard from most of my single friends was an admission of "not knowing enough."

The data indicates such a knowledge gap is still a critical reason why many women struggle to reach financial freedom. As of 2021, even the most educated and high income millennial women in mixed-sex relationships were not as involved as their husbands in long-term financial decision-making. Nearly half of high-income millennial women surveyed said their husbands take responsibility for their long-term financial planning; only one in five couples reported making financial decisions "equally."

To understand this dynamic fully, we have to look at the other side of the equation, too: 70 percent of the men who reported "taking charge" said they just didn't trust their spouse to make good financial choices. The perception/reality gap is a two-way mirror: Only 11 percent of men reported that their wives were the primary decision-makers, while 30 percent of women claimed they were. In 2023, roughly half of the women who were their household's primary earners reported that financial decision making was just "less natural" for them than it was for their husbands.

This language — "comes naturally" — is interesting, because nothing about financial knowledge under capitalism is natural. All of it must (and can) be learned. And this finding, that four in five high-income women who defer financial decisions to their male partners do so because they feel they lack the knowledge to participate equally, is exciting, because we can impact this feeling directly and immediately, for ourselves and other women we care about.

After all, it was only through acquiring more financial knowledge that I was able to recalibrate my relationship with my spending and begin investing aggressively. True financial freedom means freedom from everything, up to and including golden handcuffs that tether to a job you no longer want, or — almost always more dangerous — financial dependence on another person. Based on what we know about the demographics of widows, eight in ten women over age fifty will end up managing their finances alone. It's paramount to understand the relationship between our income, assets, and spending habits; how our spending behavior impacts our reliance on our jobs, our partners, and other situations where women have historically been trapped simply because they need the inflow of cash to keep the wheels turning. Knowledge alone is not enough, but it can function like a blueprint for a path away from that historic dependence.

Excerpted from Rich Girl Nation: Taking Charge of Our Financial Futures, by Katie Gatti Tassin, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Katie Gatti Tassin, 2025.