This all started back in April when we did a paperwork party for the dancers in Kyle Abraham Dance Vanguard (fka AIM by Kyle Abraham). We had so much fun together that they asked if we would be up for doing a wider community paperwork party and we said some version of hell yeah!

The paperwork party launched last week and got 55 RSVP’s in one day! The team at the Dance Vanguard got to work securing a larger space and we’ve now opened up more spots plus an active waitlist.

RSVP here 💌 (If it fills up, there is a waitlist that will automatically move your rsvp as more spots open up.)

Oh, and making sure we keep the party in paperwork party, there will be a happy hour to follow so we can celebrate all we accomplished.

We are proud and honored to partner with orgs like ArtBuilt, IndieSpace, and now KADV, who prioritize pouring into artists and investing in the well-being of creative community, in all the ways 💕

And speaking of ArtBuilt, our Creatives Thrive NYC series is starting this month! These workshops are virtual and all are welcome. Let’s keep the party going: ArtBuilt.org/ctnycworkshops

As we were getting ready to enter our 4th year (!!!) of providing financial education workshops that directly served the artist community, the Creatives Thrive crew spent a full day reimagining what this workshop series needed to look like.

What moment do we need to meet now that’s different from four years ago?

What are artists facing that they weren’t in 2021?

How do we make sure we deliver this information and hold this space in a way that still feels relevant and healing?

We made some big and small changes that we think will have a meaningful impact:

First, the workshops are shorter. In 2021, we were all on zoom and a 90 minute virtual workshop felt like it could fit into most of our days. Now it feels like a big ask. So we’re switching to 60 minute virtual workshops to slip into everyone’s schedules more easily.

Since the workshops will be shorter, we had to figure out how to structure them in a way that still felt valuable and gave you a reason to join live. We landed on three things:

• less content and more specific topics

• A clear connection to your nervous system and room to process what you’ve learned

• A concrete takeaway, whether it’s a checklist, spreadsheet, or action plan

And finally, we wanted to have a culminating event that happened in person! We started hosting paperwork parties last year and thought, what better way to end a series of workshops than to have a Creatives Thrive NYC Paperwork Party 🎉 While each workshop can be taken standalone, they are also cumulative in knowledge and community and we want to make space to celebrate that this year.

The first workshop is on November 19th at 1pm ET and it’s called Prepare Your Nervous System for Raising Your Rates and Negotiating:

There are few things more nerve wrecking for a creative business owner than trying to set and get your rates. It’s hard to not feel like it’s tied to your self worth, your art’s worth… oh and it’s also your livelihood. Talk about messing with your nervous system!  It can feel even harder when you realize there is no “industry standard.”  In the first Get Shamele$s workshop in the Creatives Thrive NYC series, we’ll help you:

• Calculate your ideal and minimum rates, including how to account for benefits and unpaid time

• Give you tools and language to understand how your relationship with money connects to negotiating and asking for more

• Practice negotiating and asking for your rates

• Create guidelines for how and when to use sliding scale models

You can view the whole series and RSVP here: https://www.artbuilt.org/ctnycworkshops

We can’t wait to see you at the next one!

I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to unlearn this lesson.

Dyalekt was in the middle of making dinner and he asked our son if they wanted tomato sauce with the ground turkey. Our son gave an emphatic yes, only for us to find out that we didn’t have any tomato sauce left in the house.

I offered to take them to the store to pick up a bottle.

We got to the tomato sauce aisle and our favorite brand, Rao’s was on sale! And there were a bunch of flavors we could choose from! I excitedly told our son that they could choose whatever flavor they wanted and whispered that the vodka sauce was mixed with cheese.

“That one!” they said, and happily took a bottle off the shelf.

“Oh wait,” I noticed the sale sign was only for Rao’s marinara sauce. “The vodka sauce isn’t on sale, only the marinara sauce.”

“So?” my son asked. “I want this one.”

I was not expecting this reaction, but then I realized I had never taught our son to choose something because it was on sale. I honestly don’t know if they know what the concept of a sale is.

I did some split second calculus. I only chose Rao’s today because it was on sale…

but I just made a big deal about how they could pick whatever flavor they wanted…

but the flavor they wanted wasn’t on sale…

but we could technically afford the bottle even if it wasn’t on sale…

but the only reason I chose Rao’s was because it was on sale….

but how would I even begin to explain to them why we couldn’t get it?

I looked at my confused son holding the vodka sauce. “Okay, let’s get it,” I winced.

We got home and I told Dyalekt about how the sauce was on sale, but actually wasn’t on sale.

“That’s fine,” he said and I started to let it go.

Our son proudly poured the vodka sauce into the ground turkey and in a few minutes, dinner was served.

The sauce was great, so great I wanted another serving. “Can I have more sauce?” I asked.

“Oh, that bottle is gone,” Dyalekt said.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“It’s gone, we used it all.”

I looked down at my dry pasta and muttered to myself, “Damn, that was an expensive bottle of sauce.”

Without skipping a beat, our son said, with lip-smacking satisfaction, “But it was worth it.”

I looked down at their plate. Our son, who takes an hour to eat a sandwich, had nearly polished off their entire plate of food and was finishing the last few bites.

Our son doesn’t actually ask for much. We walked into that grocery store and there was no request to go to the snack aisle or buy an extra thing at the register. We can go buy a birthday present for a friend and they’re not asking to get a present for themself too. We can walk into a store with toys and they can just look and take pictures.

Our son knows what they want and knows how to ask for it.

I haven’t unlearned the only-on-sale lesson yet, but I didn’t pass it on.

I think this is what healing looks like.

Happy summer!! We have an exciting line up of workshops this month. This is the last month of our Creatives Thrive workshop series and we’ll see you back in the fall. You can RSVP for all the workshops at getshameless.com/workshops. 

We hope to send off you with a little more financial lightness in your step as you start your summer. We’re super excited to be doing a paperwork party with IndieSpace this month that starts with coworking and ends with actual party vibes as our session leads into their networking happy hour.

6/17 VIRTUAL with Arts in Education Roundtable: Self-Financing Retirement for Artists:

We’re just going to say it – retirement planning isn’t a fair thing to ask of anyone. And it’s especially not a fair thing to ask of arts educators who have inconsistent income and immediate needs and priorities they’re trying to meet right now.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t have a huge nest egg put away or don’t know the difference between a Roth or traditional IRA and a 401k or whatever new acronyms they’re coming up with these days.

Think of this workshop as a starter or starting-over session on how to think about “retirement” as a life-long creative. Learn the language and the tools and decide what’s for you at this moment, what you can take your time on, and what you can leave on the table. 

RSVP at getshameless.com/workshops

6/18 is a double header!

6/18 at 1pm VIRTUAL: Creatives Thrive NYC Community Hour, credit and debt edition:

For this month's community hour, we want to help you really tackle your credit and debt! Bring any paperwork or mail you've gotten for anything credit & debt related. Want us to help you review your credit score? Dispute a mistake on your credit report? Decide which medical bills to pay first? Choose a student loan repayment plan? Create a debt paydown plan? We're here for all of it. As always, please feel free to come with any questions you have or come be in community. 

6/18 at 3pm IN PERSON in NYC: Paperwork Party with IndieSpace:

BONUS - this one is ending in an actual happy hour/networking hour!

If you hate dealing with paperwork, if you get anxious just thinking about it, you’re not alone. It’s not you, it’s the paperwork. The system is not designed for us and paperwork is another obstacle to navigating it. No wonder we have so much anxiety and fear around paperwork. If it feels like there is a lot at stake, there is. So much of getting personal financial tasks done revolves around paperwork and forms, which is why it’s time we had a paperwork party, because community always beats capitalism. Come with paperwork (bring your laptop!) you’ve been dreading to complete, even though you know it would level up your finances. We’ll bring the safe space and expert guidance. Come as you are, bring what you have, and leave with more clarity and fewer loose ends.

RSVP at getshameless.com/workshops

We hope to see you at one or all of these events soon!

There’s still time to RSVP for the workshop on How to Pay Down Your Debt and Still Have a Life today at 1pm ET!

Just wanted to publish a quick correction - in my previous post, I stated that IBR, ICR, and PAYE were sunsetting in July 2028, but IBR will remain an option for all loans taken out before July 1, 2026.

Any loans borrowed after July 1, 2026 will only have RAP (Repayment Assistance Plan) and the new tiered standard repayment option available, which for many folks, might be a new viable option as well.

Come talk through it together with us today at 1pm ET, RSVP here.

RSVP Here for tomorrow’s workshop on how to pay down your debt and still have a life.

The last time we did a workshop about debt, student loans were a hot mess—the SAVE Plan had just been stuck in limbo by the courts—and over a year later, the SAVE Plan option has been eliminated entirely.

We are down to two repayment options - the standard repayment option (i.e. unaffordable for most borrowers) or a 30-year Repayment Assistance Plan.

CORRECTION!! Only PAYE and ICR are being eliminated, IBR will remain. (previously stated “All the other options (IBR, PAYE, or ICR) will be eliminated”) by July 1, 2028 for any existing borrowers on the plans.

During our Paperwork Parties, student loans were the #1 thing people checked on - whether it was deciding to consolidate, getting them out of default, filling out PSLF paperwork, or just literally looking at them for the first time in a year. It’s a huge stress for so many of us and it is as confusing and convoluted as it feels.

We’ll go over all the details in our workshop tomorrow, along with info on paying down credit card debt, raising your credit score, and really, come and derail us with all your credit and debt questions where Reddit didn’t give you a satisfactory answer.

Of course we’ll also do some interpersonal neurobiology work so you don’t let your debt define you. This system is designed to put you in debt, keep you in debt, and make you feel like it’s your fault.

We’re here to remind you that there is no such thing as financial mistakes - we were all doing the best we could with what we knew at the time. Period.

We hope you see you tomorrow at 1pm ET, RSVP here!

Real quick! You can RSVP here - How to pay down your debt and still have a life (don’t worry, it’s going to be recorded in case you really can’t make it!)

I’m just going to say it - this is the workshop that people sign up for, but don’t show up for.

Most of us have debt (yes even financial planners, and no, I don’t mean a mortgage 🫣) and we all think we’re the only ones who have it. Showing up to a credit & debt workshop means you’re outing yourself, right?

The reality is, the credit and debt system is designed to keep you in their game for as long as possible. And the big cloud over this whole system is the blame and shame we’ve been fed because we “should have known better.”

Here are some nonsensical realities of the credit system that we all just have to live with and designed to make us feel maximum amounts of shame and blame:

• The modern credit scoring system was invented in 1989 - I’m older than the modern credit scoring system! It’s not even in its midlife crisis phase yet!

• Overdraft protection was invented in 1990 - before that, your card would just get declined if you didn’t have money in the account

• When you open an account, your credit score goes down. When you close an account, your credit score goes down. Yes, this includes paying off car loans or students loans.

• When someone else closes your account (like a store going out of business where you had a store card, or a credit card company deciding you haven’t used your card for too long), your credit score goes down.

• This started becoming prevalent during the pandemic, but I saw that when clients would pay down some of their credit card debt, the credit card company would automatically lower their credit limit, so they kept showing high credit utilization.

• Speaking of credit utilization, they keep raising the bar by lowering the ratio. The rule of thumb when I first started in the industry was to have your credit card balances no more than 50% of your credit limits. Then a decade or so later, they changed it to 30% of your limit. Now they saying “ideally” you don’t want your credit utilization ratio to be more than 10% of your credit limit.

• Things like your rent, utilities, and other bills don’t count positively towards your credit score if you pay on time, but they can count negatively towards your credit score if you miss payments.

I’m sure there’s tons of other maddening, fake, made-up rules I’m forgetting (and if you think of anything please share in the comments), but it’s so hard to remember when you look at your credit score or check your credit card balance and you feel like you should have known better anyway.

This workshop will remind you that you’re not wrong, you’re not a fool, and you’re not alone. RSVP at getshameless.com/workshops

We hope to see you there!

In-person Paperwork Party! In case you’ll be in the Bronx this Saturday, we will be doing an in-person Paperwork Party with Artist Resource Collective at Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance (BAAD!). The whole Money in Motion workshop goes from 1-5pm and the Paperwork Party will be from 3-5pm. RSVP HERE

In case you’re not in the Bronx, but wishing you could go to a paperwork party, maybe you could throw one instead.

A survey in the UK found that 58 percent of respondents often ignore the number of tasks on their to-do list. Four in 10 people wish they had more assistance or support completing paperwork and, AND 74 percent (3 out of 4 people!) say they don’t have someone they are able to turn to for help when they need it.

You don’t have to do this alone. If you want to practice collective care during Financial Literacy Month, here’s the recipe for throwing your own paperwork party:

Ingredients:

• Friends with laptops

• something to play music from

• snacks and drinks (or make it a paperwork potluck)

• Post-it notes and pens/markers

• A wall to put the post-it notes on

• Things that make noise (or ask people to bring a noisemaker, musical instrument, etc.)

Instructions:

Step 1: Set a date and invite people! Tell them to bring any paperwork or forms they’ve been meaning to get done and their laptop. Some ideas for what they could do:

1. Apply for a new credit card or other loan

2. Open an IRA or other investment account

3. Grant application budget

4. Review your credit report

5. Switch banks

6. Open a high yield savings account

7. Create cash flow projection

8. Apply for an ID or passport

9. Student loans anything! Review, switch to a different payment plan, consolidate, call their servicer, etc.

10. Sign up for employer benefits (transportation, health insurance, etc.)

11. Call a financial institution to reverse a charge, lower a bill, etc.

Step 2: Before people arrive, make sure there is music playing and snacks and drinks ready. Lay out post-it notes and writing instruments. Lay out noisemakers. Clear a wall to put up post-its.

Step 3: Take three post it notes and write on each: 1. Not Started, 2. In Progress, 3. Completed. Put each post-in on one part of the wall apart from each other.

Step 3: Give folks a chance to arrive and get settled - eat, drink, say hi to each other.

Step 4: Explain how this is going to work: Everyone is going to write 1-3 tasks they’d like to complete during the paperwork party, one on each post-it note. For the task they are going to start right away, tell them to put it in the In Progress column. For any other tasks they want to complete, put them in the Not Started column.

Step 5: Start doing paperwork! Feel free to ask questions out loud, see if anyone has had experience with what you’re trying to complete, and generally money buddy it up.

Step 6: Every time someone completes something, they move their post-it from In Progress to Completed and grab a noisemaker! Everyone else responds by grabbing a noisemaker or making noise in celebration!

Step 7: Every 30ish mins or so, do a little stretch or snack break in case folks need a state change. Otherwise, keep going! 1.5 hours seems to be a good amount of time to aim for.

Step 8: if you have time, you can transition the paperwork party into just… a party! Turn up the music, put out more snacks, and put away the laptops. You did it!

In that same UK survey, 89 percent of respondents felt satisfied when the paperwork was done, because, uh, yeahhhh!

Let’s celebrate supporting each other through the anxious mundanity of financial admin because it feels good when it’s done, but feels even better when we do it together. See you at the next paperwork party 📝🎉

Tomorrow! RSVP for Creative Thrive NYC’s virtual workshop, How to Heal Your Relationship with Money, 4/16 at 1pm ET.

Dyalekt and I have been thinking a lot about what financial education needs to look like as things seem to be falling apart before our eyes and one thing we will never stop teaching is how the financial system affects your nervous system.

We’ve been teaching money personalities for nearly 20 years now to kids and adults. I first learned about them at the money camps I used to teach in college, helping kids unravel their budding relationships with money.

Studies have shown that we start developing a relationship with money as early as 5 years old, but if we bring in what we know about interpersonal neurobiology, your relationship with money might even start in the womb.

I’ve talked about explicit vs implicit memory before when it comes to saving, but here’s a refresher:

💕 HUGE acknowledgment to our interpersonal neurobiology teachers, who have asked to remain anonymous, for this transformative information

Explicit memories are the conscious retrieval of past information or memories - they live in the mind. Things like appointments, birthdays, grocery lists, bank account balances live here.

Implicit memories are your unconscious, or automatic memories - they live in the body and may not be easily recalled by your mind. Things like brushing your teeth, driving a car, knowing all the words to a song, emotional connections to money live here.

Explicit memory fires off in your brain/body at 5-60 bits per second.

Implicit memory fires off in your brain/body at 11 MILLION bits per second.

What’s even more amazing is that your implicit memory starts developing at 7 months in the womb! Your memories are literally generational and so is systemic oppression.

When you have a financial system designed to ignore, exploit, or take advantage of you, AND make you believe you should blame yourself, your nervous system springs into action, doing whatever it needs to do in the moment with whatever resources you have.

This can show up as spending money as soon as you get it (no matter how much you get) because there is a fear someone will take it anyway.

This can show up as having anxiety around filling out paperwork because you or your family only had bad experiences with forms and bureaucracy.

This can show up as buying something when the rest of your life feels overwhelming because you need a dopamine hit or need to feel in control of *something.*

This can show up as feeling guilty about every purchase you make that isn’t a “need” because you weren’t allowed to want things.

This can show up as buying 20 packs of soap or a dozen tea towels because they were on sale and these things never go bad, right?

Our money personalities are the armor we put on (the protective adaptation if you want the official terminology) to withstand a financial system that is actively trying to harm us.

The How to heal your relationship with money workshop gives you the neuroscience and the context to start asking yourself why instead of telling yourself you should have, to forgive yourself instead of blaming yourself.

We are here to remind you that there are no such things as financial mistakes because we’re all just doing the best we can with what we knew at the time.

We are here to remind you that your net worth does not equal your self worth and a punitive system doesn’t mean you have to punish yourself, it means we’re all in this together.

We’ll see you tomorrow. RSVP here.

Happy Financial Literacy Month and Happy Poetry Month!

We are excited to share that we have another set of workshops for April, including another in-person Paperwork Party in the Bronx, with Artist Resource Collective, hosted by BAAD! Hope to see you at one of them this month:

April 16th at 1pm ET (virtual) - How to Heal Your Relationship with Money - RSVP HERE

Artists and money have a complicated relationship. You’re often caught between “if you make money from your art, you’re a sellout” and “if you don’t make a living off your art, are you really an artist?” Very few professions have such contradictory measures for success, so money conversations can be emotionally charged and difficult to have ❤️‍🩹

You are experts at creating something out of nothing and finding the beauty in hard things. You have dedicated your life’s work to doing things radically different and bringing your community with you. You push the edge so the center moves too. And your family still has no idea what your “job” is 🙃 We see you. We know you. We are you. Start healing your relationship with money so you can be the artist the world needs you to be.

April 25th from 1-5pm (in person with BAAD!) - Money in Motion, including an afternoon Paperwork Party! RSVP HERE

Money in Motion: Dive into a series of specialized workshops on banking, budgeting, credit, savings and more—real tools, real strategy, no shame. Money in Motion offers an afternoon of financial workshops designed to empower artists and creatives. You’ll receive information, resources, and real-time activities to move you forward toward your financial goals. The afternoon will also feature a Paperwork Party with Pam Capalad and Dyalekt, offering practical support and collective energy to tackle the forms, finances, and administrative tasks that artists often put off—together, with guidance and no shame.

Bring the paperwork you’ve been dreading. We’ll provide a supportive, low-stress space and expert guidance to help you move things forward. Come as you are, bring what you have, and leave with more clarity and fewer loose ends.

Some ideas for what you can do: Apply for a new credit card or loan • Open an IRA or other investment account • Write a budget for a grant application • Review your credit report • Switch banks • Open a high yield savings account • Create cash flow projections • Fill out student loan forms

Schedule
1:00 - 1:45  Philosophy, Banking & Budgeting | 2:00 - 2:45  Credit & Debt, Retirement and Care | 3:00 -5:00  Paperwork Party

April 29th at 6pm ET (virtual) - Why is it so hard to save? RSVP HERE

What if we told you that the ability to save money has nothing to do with willpower and discipline and everything to do with your relationship to money? In this webinar, you will learn the systemic reasons why it’s hard to save, dispel common savings myths, learn the neuroscience behind money memories, and examine your own relationship with saving or not saving money.

Get our whole workshop schedule at getshameless.com/workshops

Financial Literacy Month is every month for us 🎉

RSVP for our virtual Paperwork Party on 3/25 at 6pm with Artist Resource Collective here.

I never thought we would say this, but we are positively buzzing from all the paperwork everyone got done last week! I had to end Saturday’s workshop saying, “okay guys, sorry, you have to stop doing paperwork” 😅

People checked their student loans, signed up for public service loan forgiveness, called creditors, opened high yield savings accounts and IRA’s, signed up for their company’s benefits, decided if they should keep their insurance policies, applied for credit cards, filled out timesheets, sent invoices, someone even applied for a REAL ID and made the DMV appointment.

(If you want the stats, 38 tasks were completed by 29 people.)

Dyalekt and I were available to answer questions and have mini office hours to help folks decide if they needed to consolidate debt, which high yield savings account to open, talk through a tricky form, or get advice on how to move forward on a financial decision.

We all celebrated every time someone completed a task, like it was our win too, because it was. Someone said they felt lighter, that you don’t need to know exactly what someone is going through to support and celebrate them. We were just there for each other.

ICYMI, here’s the racist, classist history of paperwork and why doing it together literally makes it easier to get through.

Collective care is self care and community beats capitalism. Every. Time.

Come Paperwork Party with us! RSVP Here.

RSVP here for this month’s Creatives Thrive NYC workshop, How to Align Your Spending with Your Values, on Thursday 3/19 at 1pm ET.

This workshop is going to be full of big questions and one of the big ones we’re asking each other is:

Is it even capitalism anymore? Think about it:

We don’t work the same types of jobs, & every side has a hustle

38% of the US workforce did some type of freelance work in 2023. That means we are paying more taxes, have less benefits, and are more expendable. It’s hard for our labor to NOT be exploited these days.

Every joy is commodified and commercialized

The pressure to monetize everything peaked in the girlboss era of the 2010’s, but now, it’s just an expectation. Unlearning that not everything needs to be a commodity and not every idea needs to be a business idea.

Our personal lives are on display for judgment

Here’s your daily social-media-isn’t-real reminder - don’t judge your worst moments against someone’s best moments. Also, I’m sorry because I’m scrolling through instagram doing that right now. I probably saw this worst moments best moments quote on instagram.

Authenticity is everyone’s Brand. Also everyone has a Brand

If everyone has a brand, everyone has something to sell and everyone is constantly being asked to buy. We don’t just buy from stores anymore, we buy from each other. Which really means we’re buying things from stores and putting our “brand on it” to sell to other people who are also buying things from stores to sell to other people

We don’t shop the same, and the places we buy from don’t source the same

We didn’t think it could get worse than Amazon, then along came Shein and Temu. Can we even call these places stores anymore? They’re all just networks of warehouses with underpaid workers trying to package things as quickly as possible and getting paid as little as possible.

This comment about delivery workers lives rent free in my head:

And yet.

Sometimes it’s so overwhelming to think about how big the problem is and how small we are that the only thing it feels like we can do is… buy something.

Let’s unpack all that together. Join us this Thursday 3/19 at 1pm ET and we’ll talk through the whole complicated mess of how to align your spending with your values.

I don’t know how this happened (or maybe I know exactly how it happened), but we’re having three paperwork parties in March, two of which are free and open to the public with Artist Resource Collective and one of which is IN PERSON in NYC! 🎉

RSVP to the in person Paperwork Party on March 21

RSVP to the virtual Paperwork Party on March 25

See all our upcoming workshops at getshameless.com/workshops

So, why a Paperwork Party you might ask? Paperwork is just paperwork, right? Actually, it’s not.

If you get anxiety from filling out paperwork, you are not alone. Just googling paperwork anxiety can make you feel a little less alone:

The (racist, classist) History of Paperwork

So many of my clients felt anxious about filling out forms and calling or interacting with financial institutions that I had to figure out why. So I did some research on the history of paperwork.

Phase 1:

Paperwork used to be internal documents businesses filled out for you 🤯 They’d use it to build a relationship with a client (can you imagine??) while streamlining internal processes:

“Earlier public administrations also used forms and questionnaires, but these were filled by officers instead of by citizens, and thus by members of the same organization.” - [Harms], summarizing [Becker] The Unofficial History of Forms

Phase 2:

*Somewhere* along the way, it became the customer’s responsibility to fill out these forms, but they stayed just as complicated and confusing:

“20th century governments delegated the increasing administrative workload that resulted from large social welfare programs to citizens – who then had to fill out forms on their own.” - [Harms], summarizing [Becker] The Unofficial History of Forms

People of color are the majority of welfare recipients (23% Black, 26% Hispanic, 8% Asian/Pacific Islander) and there is more likely to be a language barrier so completing paperwork to get these benefits is a larger obstacle.

Phase 3:

Then somewhere *further* along the way, paperwork became a barrier to access:

“Forms took over the role of officers as mediating interfaces between citizens and public administration.” - [Harms], summarizing [Becker] The Unofficial History of Forms

• In the summer of 1947, three thousand VA home loans were issued in Mississippi, with only two of those loans being granted to black veterans.

• In 2023, Black homebuyers were more likely to get denied for a mortgage than white homebuyers (1 in 4 Black borrowers vs. 1 in 10 white borrowers).

Paperwork has become a way to keep people out instead of letting people in:

“Contracts have gotten exponentially longer than they were a generation or so ago. So here we are with more complicated contracts, more complicated legalese, while the American consumer has less and less time to deal with and read these materials.” - Devin Fergus, Land of the Fee

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacres were called a “riot” by local newspapers. Buried in the fine print of the business owners’ insurance policies, it stated that claims could be denied in the event of a riot. Black Wall Street could not rebuild.

The interpersonal neurobiology part:

Paperwork as a tool for oppression has been happening for generations. Genetic memory has taught many of us to not trust paperwork, and for good reason. The anxiety you feel when you are required to fill out a form is most likely a protective adaptation you inherited and your mistrust of paperwork has continued to be proven right.

Completing paperwork shrinks your window of tolerance. It feels inherently transactional, dehumanizing, and designed for you to fail. It is presented as a seemingly mundane and “easy” task, which makes you feel lazy or inadequate if you can’t get it done.

Paperwork Party is designed to help you unlearn all these harmful, false beliefs about your abilities and self worth:

You are human. You are not less of a person because you can’t fill out a random form someone designed in a silo. Your ability to move in this world should not be determined by forms and boxes.

You are not alone. You are not the only one who has trouble filling out paperwork, who may have missed out on something because you couldn’t submit it by the deadline, who struggles with life admin.

You don’t have to do this alone. Let us be your paperwork money buddies for a day! Even if you can’t make it to one of our upcoming paperwork parties, find a money buddy or two who also has some forms to fill out that have been following them like a shadow and get them done together. Make it a date, put out some food, good music, and set up planned breaks.

If you want to learn more about my utter loathing of paperwork, check out my response to the first question on the Culture Study piece I wrote in 2021 (still can’t believe I got to write for Anne Helen Petersen!).

Community beats capitalism. Every. Time.

RSVP to the in person Paperwork Party on March 21

RSVP to the virtual Paperwork Party on March 25

See all our upcoming workshops at getshameless.com/workshops

Next week, we’ll be holding our first Creatives Thrive NYC Community Office Hours of the year. It will be on 2/26 at 1pm ET. This office hours, we’re also doing a mini cash flow projections lesson since we didn’t get to it last time.

The last workshop, Make More Money This Year (recording here if you want to view/share it), turned into an impromptu community office hours by the end. Dyalekt and I got the opportunity to take off our facilitation hats and witness artist after artist, creative after creative, unmute themselves and light up the chat, giving advice, sharing experiences, and holding space for each other.

I think of the word alchemy when creating these types of community spaces because that’s what it feels like. I just did the corny thing and looked up the definition and: Alchemy is a power or process that changes or transforms something in a mysterious or impressive way. An inexplicable or mysterious transmuting.

Come-as-you-are is your contribution here - the mixture of everyone’s life experiences, wins and losses, emotions and baggage, is what transmutes the space. You can feel it, even through zoom.

Relationship is Everything is one of the first things we learned in interpersonal neurobiology (the neuroscience of how you are hurt and how you heal in relationships). *HUGE acknowledgement to our interpersonal neurobiology teachers, who have asked to remain anonymous, for this transformative information. Anything in italics is a direct quote from them

The most diabolical thing about capitalism is that it removes your humanity and turns you into a series of numbers - how much you make, how much you have in your bank account, how much you’re allowed to charge for your work, how many clients you have, how many pieces you’ve sold.

Capitalism makes you believe you have to do it alone and your community is your competition. There is no such thing as doing it alone.

What does “relationship is everything” mean? Bonnie Badenoch, interpersonal neurobiologist, says that “the smallest nervous system is two people” - even when we are alone, our brain is always drawing from relationships. You actually don’t and can’t “self-regulate.”

Our emotional-motivational systems are always monitoring for connection/disconnection and adjusting accordingly. Our bodies are always assessing, in any situation, if we feel connected to the people in the room or if we have a connection to people in our lives that can anchor our nervous systems.

What is not reflected is annihilated. If the financial system keeps showing you that you don’t matter, you’ll start to believe it. You need to literally feel seen by your people to be able to face the systemic oppression and dehumanizing practices of capitalism and all the -isms it brings with it.

This looks like someone holding space for your raw feelings as they come up, being able to celebrate your wins as much as support you through your struggles, believing you when you share your experiences, trusting that the advice and feedback lifts up your work and your humanity.

This is what it means to have attuned relationships.

This is the alchemy of collective care.

We hope to see you at the next community office hours. You can RSVP here.

Our workshop on how to make more money this year is tomorrow at 1pm, you can RSVP here.

Just to warn you though, you may walk away thinking, actually I don’t want to make more money this year, I don’t want to grow or expand or scale, I just need to make *this much* and I will actually be okay.

That’s the magic of tuning into your nervous system while you look at spreadsheets like cash flow projections. They can be a window into multiple futures and sometimes, seeing a future where the graph isn’t always pointing up can be a huge relief.

Join us on zoom on Thursday 1/15 at 1pm ET and get a peek into what future you want to create.

I’ve been saying for years that January isn’t my new year (the real new year is the spring solstice blah blah blah), but it sure does feel like the new year every time anyway.

This is our third year running the Make More Money This Year workshop and things feel more uncertain than they have ever been. How can you do cash flow projections and calculate your ideal income and ask for more money in the midst of everything else going on?

You literally cannot envision the future unless your nervous system feels safe in the present. In other words, everyone in the world may be telling you that you have to set GOALS RESOLUTIONS VISION, but your body is saying nope nope nope. We promise you’re not the only one feeling this way.

The way money is usually “taught” doesn’t resonate because it’s centered in a system and not in your humanity. Making money can bring up the most feelings of inadequacy, and the one that will test all your doubts and defeatist things you say to yourself about your work.

We’re going to be talking about how to make more money this year and how just the very thought of it can make your nervous system go haywire. We’ll give you a safe space to ease how it feels to make more money and the tools to make it happen.

So yeah, we’ll have the cash flow projections and the calculators and the action steps, and we’ll also have the neuroscience that will help ground you and give you permission to create the life you want to live and help the people who you want to help.

The workshop is next Thursday, Jan 15 at 1pm ET. RSVP here and we’ll see you soon ❤️‍🔥

Another quick reminder! Our Art as a Business workshop is tomorrow (or TODAY depending on when you’re reading this!), 11/20 at 1pm ET. RSVP here. It’s virtual so you don’t have to be in NYC to join, yay!!

This is going to sound strange, but I’ve had to teach myself how to want things.

I’ve had to teach my clients how to want things too.

One of the earliest money lessons I ever got from my mom was that I should only buy things if they were on sale. I have memories of beelining for the sale racks in every store (Macy’s had the best ones) and doing all our back to school shopping at outlet malls. My wardrobe was full of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger logo shirts and Levi’s jeans with last season’s cuts.

I remember the first time I bought something for myself that wasn’t on the sale rack. In fact, the store was so new, there was no sale rack. A Lululemon store had opened up in Santa Barbara. I had been doing yoga for over a year at that point, finishing my senior year of college, and just wanted a pair of their $90 yoga pants. Yes, they were $90 in 2007.

I walked in and was instantly greeted by a salesperson who helped me find my size, wrote my name on the dressing room door, and checked on me a few times to see if I needed anything. I settled on a pair of flared yoga pants with a rainbow waistband.

I can still feel the bounce in my step walking out of the store with the coveted Lululemon reusable shopping bag (that was a big deal in 2007!). These pants were literally the first thing in my closet that wasn’t on sale or thrifted. I wanted something and I GOT IT.

It can be hard to tell the difference between “I want this” or “I need a dopamine hit.”

It can be hard to tell the difference between “I want this” or “someone told me I should want this.”

It can be hard to tell the difference between “I want this” or “this is the most practical choice out of all the options I think exist.”

It can be hard to tell the difference between “I want this” or “maybe I’ll never get this opportunity again.”

It can be hard to tell the difference between “I want this” or “I want that but I can’t have it, so I guess I’ll settle for this.”

It can be hard to tell the difference between “I want this” or “I’ve never been given permission to want anything so I can’t even begin to imagine what that word means.”

We’ve been taught to not want things, to only buy things we need, to sacrifice our wants in the name of optimizing our money… and I looked around my apartment one day and realized I hated everything in it because I had bought everything on sale and I hadn’t really wanted anything in it.

The irony is, we end up spending more money because we don’t know what we want. We’re chasing deals, going on discount vacations instead of letting ourselves plan to take the dream vacation, choosing the practical job or relationship or city instead of the thing that makes our heart beat a little faster or gives us butterflies thinking about it.

Then we end up spending money trying to fill a void of not getting what we want by… spending money on things we also didn’t want.

I wish I could give you something like The 5 Steps for Knowing What You Want and Getting It. I wish it were that easy. But our money histories, our run-ins with the financial system, our relationship with our families, our contorting ourselves to fit into the box that we hope leads to a livelihood - it’s all entangled.

What I can share are some feelings I remember when I truly got what I wanted.

There was a lightness to my step when I walked out of the Lululemon store that day. I felt like I didn’t need to buy anything for a long time - not out of guilt, but because I felt satisfied. My arms feel tingly thinking about it.

There was a sense of longing I felt whenever I thought about wanting to move to New York 17 years ago. I knew it was going to be hard to move across the country, but also it felt harder to stay where I was. I can feel it in my chest.

When we found our first house… well, here’s an excerpt from a long ago wordpress blog about it: “I saw the house first – it was filled with trash, it smelled like a combination of stale bodily fluids and vomit, squatters had been taking turns in it for the last few years, and I loved it!” We’d seen dozens of houses already and this was the one that made me feel like we could dream. I feel it deep in my stomach.

What are some times you remember when you really wanted something and you got it? How did you feel? Where do you feel it in your body when you think about it now?

Hold onto this feeling so you recognize it next time. It’s your body teaching you how to want things.

Last week, Pockets Change held our fourth annual Hip Hop FinFest! (you can watch the replay here, with finalists between the ages of 14-19 years old. The songs were ❤️‍🔥).

This year’s theme was “When Money Makes Change,” asking students how they show up as financial advocates for themselves, their families, and their communities. As Dyalekt and I were thinking up what lessons we wanted to teach to go with the student songs, we revisited one of our favorite concepts - the four types of wealth, which are:

Financial wealth: Money and assets

Social Wealth: Relationships and community

Physical Wealth: Health & well-being

Time Wealth: Freedom to spend time as you wish

We’ve taught this concept in workshops before and I teach it to my 1-1 clients when we put together their core values statements, but as we were listening to the student songs, we saw the direct correlation each song made to recognizing that money was not their only resource.

Money was not their only source of wealth.

Social wealth:

The first song, by Jay the Creator, explored social wealth. The song went into the tension between feeling like he needed to be rich to get ahead vs. trust in his faith and family to support him. By the end, he was talking about taxing the rich!

Money is transactional which makes it easy to quantify and measure. You give me this, you get that in return. Relationships are reciprocal, which means there is no keeping score, there’s no tally on how much love you receive from your family or how much care you give.

Social wealth asks you: what non-monetary contributions do you bring to your community? What do you receive? Social wealth can feel intangible, but it lives in your body in the form of attuned relationships and a desire to show up.

Physical wealth:

The second song, by R.L. Bylay, explored physical wealth. This is not just about health, it’s also physical and emotional safety. When R.L. talked about not wanting Dolce & Gabana, just food on the table all week, how he wanted to watch his mom grow old without giving her gray hairs, and how money can tear families apart, he was asking us how much is enough?

Physical wealth asks you: You can have more money, but at what price?

I think about my physical wealth every day. Every time I can walk an extra mile home, twist open the toothpaste cap, pick up my child, I am reminded of the price I paid for giving into the hustle and what I’ve gained by giving it up.

Time wealth:

The third song, by KrayKay, explored time wealth. I think some of her bars sums this type of wealth up nicely:

“I hate to burst a bubble, but money is not achievable, it’s a repeat cycle”

“Good days were a blessing, bad days were still a win”

“‘Keep going’ mentality, but that’s just so they keep you”

Valuing money over time puts you on a never-ending hamster wheel. The days bleed together, the grind feels inevitable, the burnout starts to show up in your physical and social life.

Time wealth asks you: if you let yourself imagine what a perfect day or a perfect week looks like, what would you be willing to do, change, or give up to feel that sense of freedom and lightness?

We shared with our young folks that it can be easy to fill time with ways to make money. It’s encouraged and celebrated. But no one ever talks about how to practice protecting your time - carving out space for you to just be. This is what setting boundaries actually looks like. And yes, it takes practice.

The four types of wealth in action:

One of the most recent best examples of tapping into other types of wealth to create movements is Zohran’s Mamdani’s campaign. Regardless of your politics, the reason why this mayoral race was so noteworthy was the ground game:

• 100,000 canvassers and phone banker used their time, social, and physical wealth to contribute to this campaign. Dyalekt said it felt like every 4th call he made was someone saying they were also canvassing or phone banking.

• The campaign had to make a video saying to please stop sending them money (they hit the campaign limit cap) and consider volunteering instead.

• The only way to get official Zohran merch was to canvas. You literally could not buy it.

• The Mamdani campaign spent their dollars on hosting soccer tournaments, city-wide scavenger hunts, and paper shredding ice cream parties.

• The day before the primary election, Mamdani walked the length of Manhattan to shake as many people’s hands as possible. The day before the general election, Mamdani walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with hundreds of people behind him.

They ran this campaign knowing they could not outspend the opposition (with Cuomo’s final campaign spending at $55 million 💩). Instead, they tapped into other sources of wealth that gave people the ability and desire to participate in ways beyond asking them to reach into their bank accounts. It asked people to talk to their neighbors, explore the city they love, and go outside!

A little four types exercise for you:

I didn’t talk about financial wealth–one because it’s all we ever do–but also because when you ignore social, time, and physical wealth, your financial wealth suffers. When you feed the other types of wealth, your financial wealth grows in a way that is in line with your values.

We want to ask you how you can use financial wealth to support the other three types of wealth.

Free write or draw: Rank the 4 types of wealth (financial, social, physical, time) and list one purchase you make to support your social, physical, and time wealth. Feel free to hit reply or share in the comments. Watch a video about this on our Patreon.

The four types of wealth remind us that there is value in our inherent humanity. When we slow down, take care of our bodies, and take care of our people, we have enough.

It’s been a while yall. I’ve been dealing with a few health situations over the last season, including the one year anniversary of my rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis. More on that another time.

We’re about to enter our 3rd year with Creatives Thrive NYC (and beyond!), continuing to partner with ArtBuilt through a generous grant with the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs to make financial education for artists and creatives free, accessible, and liberating.

This is truly one of the most favorite things Dyalekt and I get to do. If you’ve seen us in these workshops, I hope you can tell through the zoom screen how honored we feel that you trust us with your time, energy, and vulnerability. Also yall are so fun!!

This round, we have five workshops and two office hours, starting with Art as a Business on Nov 20th at 1pm. Get the full line up at https://www.artbuilt.org/ctnyc.

I love the Art as a Business workshop because over the years, it’s evolved from a workshop with lots of *things you should be doing* as a *business owner who never wanted to be a business owner* into a workshop about how to help your nervous system deal with having to monetize your art.

From paperwork anxiety, to business structure and taxes, to invoicing, to putting together a financial team, to interpersonal neurobiology, we’ll give you a foundation to be an artist who can handle your business while taking care of yourself.

This work feels more urgent than ever. Artists are more needed than ever. Which means artists need support more than ever. We hope to be a part of that support for you into 2026.

Please RSVP and join us live or watch the replay later.

In other fun news, we just got a puppy for our son’s birthday, so we’ll leave you with the obligatory puppy pic:

Hey, it’s Pam 🦋

Let me tell you a little story about how one of the biggest toy companies in the country went bankrupt🦒

It was 2005 and Toys R Us🧸 wasn’t doing great. Their toy sales were mediocre, which meant their stock price for investors was losing value📉 The management team decided it was time to do something about it, so they did what all the C-suite cool kids were doing - turning to private equity.

Enter three private equity firms - Vornado Realty Trust💩, KKR💩, and Bain Capital💩 (Bain Capital being owned by none other than former presidential candidate and state senator, Mitt Romney).

The industry *lovingly* refers to these types of private equity firms as vulture capitalists, so I’m just going to call them Vultures☠️ from now on, because all they do is scavenge and destroy.

These Vultures agreed to buy Toys R Us in the summer of 2004, which sent the stock price up because shareholders knew there’s going to be a big buyout soon. It went from $12.02📈 in Jan 2004, to $16.42📈 in August 2024, to over twice as much at $26.75📈 in 2005 when it was sold to the Vultures.

To buy all the shares of Toys R Us from all the shareholders, it would cost the Vultures $6.6 billion💰💰💰

This is where it gets so fucked up 👇🏼

There is this thing called a leveraged buyout (LBO) where Vultures can basically get a mortgage🏘️ for buying a whole ass multinational corporation.

To buy Toys R Us, the Vultures were like, hey, we can put 20% down, and then we’ll borrow the other 80% and…. drum roll… use Toys R Us assets as collateral! 🧨

But wait, you ask, does that mean Toys R Us is going to be responsible for paying back the debt? 👀 And you would be correct, to the tune of $400 million a year 💸

By carrying this heavy debt burden, Toys R Us couldn’t ✂️reinvest into its employees, ✂️keep its stores clean and stocked, or ✂️upgrade their website and infrastructure to compete with the online sales boom of the 2010’s.

(Oh and also btw, the Vultures were charging exorbitant expenses, advisory, and management fees, which totaled about $200 million over the years because why tf not 🤑)

(Oh oh oh, and also btw, in 2010, after taking all their cash and loading them up with debt, the Vultures tried to pull a reverse Uno and take Toys R Us public again to try to unload the company on the stock market📉 They had to back out due to “challenging market conditions”... 🙃)

Toys R Us had about $2.2 billion in cash reserves when the Vultures took over in 2005 and by the time they went bankrupt in 2018, their cash had dwindled to $301 million and their debt doubled from $2.3 billion to $5.2 billion 🧨💥

Meanwhile they were still selling 20% of all toys in the US - that’s right, Toys R Us was selling 1 out of every 5 toys in the country when they filed for bankruptcy 🤯 They reported a $29 million loss in 2017, but only because they were paying $400 million/year in debt🤬

As part of the bankruptcy hearings, the Vultures convinced the judge to allow for 17 C-suite execs to each get $14 million payouts to “incentivize them to boost sales during the holiday season” to raise money to pay off creditors🤬

In March 2018, Toys R Us announced it would be closing all 1600 stores in 38 countries and leaving 33,000 employees with no job and no severance✂️ It was one of 35 retail stores that filed for bankruptcy that year.

Private equity firms are baaaaaaaddd☠️☠️☠️

And by the end of 2025, private equity firms are trying to come for our 401k’s

Here’s the thing about private equity - they usually raise their money from ✔️wealthy, ✔️accredited investors. Most private equity firms have minimum investment requirements anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to $1 million💰💰💰

Accredited means something official in the financial industry - to be an ✔️accredited investor, you either have to earn over $200k per year ($300k for a couple), or have over $1mm in net worth💰💰💰, or be a 👔financial professional

This rule is in place to protect the average investor from a financial instrument that is 🚩complex, 🚩has high investment risk, 🚩is expensive to manage, 🚩has no transparency requirements, and 🚩can tie up your money for years.

Pensions are also allowed to invest in private equity because a 👔financial professional is responsible for choosing the investments, but when was the last time you saw a company offering a pension? 👀 Since the 80’s, most companies switched out pensions for 401k’s because it’s way cheaper to make your employees fund their own retirements than setting aside profits to fund it for them 🤬

So eventually the private equity firms run out of rich people who can invest and all that pension money that companies used to invest is now gone💸 Instead, there are $12.5 TRILLION in 401k’s which weren’t allowed to hold private equity because of that whole ✔️accredited investor thing… until now🧨🧨🧨

The current administration is finalizing an executive order that would allow investment companies to include private equity firms in 401k’s, claiming that the average investor should have 🚩access to private equity so 🚩their retirement accounts can get 🚩higher investment returns.

Who really makes more money?

In exchange for these higher returns, private equity firms charge “advisory” and “management fees,” which are usually based on something called 2 and 20 - they charge investors a 2% management fee🤑 no matter what and also keep 20% of the profits🤑 over a certain threshold before they distribute to investors. It’s not only legal, it’s best practice.

Blackrock💩 is planning to add private equity to their target date retirement funds in 2026, expecting 0.5% more growth a year🧻 which equates to an extra $50 for every $10,000 you have in your account🚽

Empower💩, the 2nd largest 401k company with 19 million plan participants, is planning to offer private equity later this year through investment managers like Apollo💩, Franklin Templeton💩, Goldman Sachs💩, Neuberger Berman💩, PIMCO💩, Partners Group💩 and Sagard💩.

And thus begins another infinite loop of private equity using your money to make them money and throwing you a few crumbs for the privilege🍪

The Vultures are circling.

What to do if you have a 401k (or 403b if you’re at a nonprofit) and don’t want to invest in private equity

A lot of mechanisms that were designed to make it “easier” to set up your 401k, like ✅automatically enrolling you into the 401k, ✅choosing your contribution amount for you, or ✅choosing an investment fund on your behalf, will also make it easy to sneak private equity into your account 🚩

📧Look out for an email. The good news/bad news is the 👔financial industry is required to disclose any major changes to your investment options, but they can do it in the most 🫥confusing, 🫥tiny-font, 🫥jargon-heavy way possible, in a 🫥mass email that is 🫥easy to ignore and may or may not end up in your 🫥spam folder.

Don’t worry about missing one of these emails because, well first of all, I don’t want to give you something else to keep you up at night. I’m mentioning it to plant a little seed🌱 in your mind in case you do notice it. The emails will usually say something like ✏️fund update, or ✏️investment options update.

💻Commit to logging into your 401k once every three months. If you’ve never logged into your 401k before, now is the time. We can’t let our 401k’s be set-it-and-forget-it anymore.

Take note of what you’re currently invested in and ✏️write down the name of the fund(s). For instance, Blackrock’s target date retirement fund for those planning to retire in 2050 is called “LifePath Index 2050 Fund.”

🗓️Every three months, ✏️make sure the name of the funds are still the same. If the fund names have changed, 🔎google the new fund name + private equity to see if these new funds contain any Vultures.

✏️Pay special attention if you have Blackrock funds or you have an Empower 401k. They might have other ways to sneak in the Vultures by not being required to change the names of the funds, so around the beginning of the year, 🔎google the fund name + private equity.

Looking at your 401k for the first time may feel intimidating and confusing🫣 That’s okay. The first 10 times I looked at my 401k, I felt that too. Each time I logged in, it felt more and more familiar🌱

💪🏼Are you in HR or do you help choose company benefits? If you have any decision making power in your company to help choose the 401k investment options, you can make it clear to the 👔401k plan advisors that you don’t want to offer private equity as part of your plan’s investment options.

Can you just roll over your 401k into an IRA? Sadly, no❌ If you still work at the company where you have your 401k, you aren’t allowed to roll it over - the company controls the 401k until you no longer work there. You can only move a 401k into an IRA from past employers.

If you do have old 401k’s from past employers, now might be the time to roll those over into an IRA so you have more control over what you’re invested in ✅

I know there is soooo much going on right now💕

I also know the 👔financial industry is taking advantage of this time by coming after something most of us don’t think about very often. I’m going to do my best to stay on top of this development and feel free to send me anything you find too🤝

Please share this with anyone who might have a 401k. We might not be able to stop the Vultures from circling, but we can make sure we don’t make it easy to come after our retirement funds🗡️🛡️, 12.5 trillion times over.

🎙️Fun side note: We did a podcast episode on who bankrupted Toys R Us🧸 back in 2018 and I relistened to it to write this piece. This was the first time I used ourselves as a source for another thing. We’re pretty funny, even when we’re talking about leveraged buyouts🤓 Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on YouTube

Oh, also, I’ve decided to keep my CFP® designation 🦋 Thanks to everyone who wrote and called to share your thoughts. I was feeling fatigued by all the things and your words gave me life again🙏🏼

(Also, thanks for indulging me with all the emojis, it was the only way I could get through this one 😅)