Money Story: Lex Ritchie
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Lex Ritchie is a tarot reader and folk magical educator. You can find more about their work at www.thelexritchie.com IG @thelexritchie
HC: Who are you, what are your pronouns, and what do you do?
I’m Lex Ritchie, I use they/them pronouns, and I’m a tarot reader and folk magical educator. I help folks connect to their magic so they can make change in their lives and in their world.
HC: What brought you to a place where you wanted to learn how to get your money stuff together?
LR: It was really starting my own business that prompted it. I’m not someone who has a ton of experience with money. I grew up working class, not affluent. For a large part of my adult life, I didn’t make enough money to have to file taxes. By the time I started a business, I had never filed taxes. The other half of my adult life was filled with bad tax experiences--I had terrible luck with taxes. One year my partner's employer was committing tax fraud. Another year a number was wrong on our W2, and caused an enormous headache, and another year I was paid differently because I was a grad student.
I went from making too little to file to owing taxes every year after that. When I started my business, I needed to figure this out and know what I’m doing.
Like a lot of people who go from being poor to having some money, there’s this pain around that. There is a shame of not knowing. A shame that you have to know these things now. I needed to go into this business with my eyes open, not giving in to the past trauma or knee-jerk responses I had before. I wanted to build my business and grow it into something that can support me. I had to take responsibility towards my business, like taxes. I wanted to take personal responsibility towards that.
HC: Is there anything that being in Money Bootcamp has taught you, or that has changed for you?
LR: It’s funny. I’ve been a part of Money Bootcamp for two years. I wouldn't at any point have been able to pinpoint that I know these things or that my relationship to money is changing, until I was talking to a friend who is switching to contract work from full time employment, because she has a baby. And I’m like, “hey, there are these tax benefits, and she’s like hey, how do you know all this?”
The fact I pay my quarterly taxes, I’m in this position where I know enough to ask the right questions, I don’t have to just go along with it. I know enough to advocate for myself - it provides me with knowledge and not just garbled nonsense.
I come from a science background. My major was in science communication, so I know a lot about communication.
One thing that comes from having greater financial literacy is that I, as someone who owns my own business, have to pay taxes out of my account every quarter. It’s not automatic. Better financial literacy means knowing when I have enough, and don’t. Budgeting. That’s been part of this larger effort in my life of how to navigate money. Because I have this thing--I didn’t have money growing up, so I never feel like I have enough. I’ve learned how to navigate what I need, earmark for savings, and figure what is ok. Both my partner and I are chronically ill. Figuring out that my partner will not be able to do his work forever. Ensuring ok-ness with that. Past baggage from not knowing when we had enough.
It’s easy to hoard. That is the default. When you grew up feeling like you needed to hoard money, its easy to do, because there’s a cultural default. [Having a sense of enough-ness is] helping me live my values in that way.
Having enough: for me, when I was in engineering, I studied sustainability. Sustainability is important to me. One reason I left grad school is that when we talk about sustainability, we aren't’ critiquing the ways we talk about progress, money, and the economy. The ways those feed sustainability and feed structures of unsustainability. The same goes for money and my values--I value sustainability and abundance. There’s a ceiling to that. It looks different. It manifests differently for different people. I’m recognizing that sufficiency for myself. Growing up poor, when you're stuck in insufficiency for so long, it’s hard to recognize when you really do have enough. For me, numbers make sense. Seeing it in my numbers was helpful, and allowed me to see that it is sustainable, that I could share more, and that saving wasn’t just pointless--I was able to build a cushion.
HC: Is there anything else you’d like other people to know?
LR: Something I want to talk about is to shout out to you, and how amazingly you hold space for how complicated and stressful and wrapped up in trauma and injustice taxes are.
When we had our conversation last year, I was like “I have perennial problems around taxes” and you were like “none of that is your fault.”
You can learn more about what Lex does at their website: https://thelexritchie.com/