In 2020 Gordon Gekko Is Out, ‘Mindful Millionaires’ Are In
In 1987 film Wall Street, Gekko was the prophet of “greed is good” type of finance. Gen Z isn’t buying it.
In the 1987 Wall Street film the character of Gordon Gekko is known for popularizing “greed is good” and inspiring legions of predatory, uncompromising investors. The crucible known as 2020 may mint a new generation of so-called mindful millionaires.
With unemployment benefits expiring at the end of July without a clear replacement plan, at least 30 million unemployed Americans are feeling the financial pressure more acutely. The threat of a double-dip recession is still hovering there, with more households preparing for difficult times ahead.
And it’s the millennials and those younger -- a demographic that now makes up more than half of the U.S. population -- that will feel the weight of these financial challenges the most.
“There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic will most negatively impact the economic prospects of younger generations, who are bearing the brunt of outsized job losses, evictions, and—among Gen Z—disruptions in education,” William H. Frey, senior fellow with the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, summed up.
It’s a tough balancing act for the Gen Z especially who tends to be more risk-averse than previous generations, according to data and analysis from Center for Generational Kinetics, as well as more likely to care about “progressive” causes like gender equality and the environment.
"They (Gen Z) want to invest in things with social impact," Chris Lustrino, the founder of KingsCrowd, a rating system for online investment opportunities, told Cheddar last month. "They want to invest in things around cleantech. They want to invest in female founders and minority founders. They are much more socially driven in their investing. They don't necessarily have a lot of money now, but they are going to run into a lot of money over the coming decades."
New Way of Thinking About Money
As many will rethink their relationship with money in this changing reality, a new book by Leisa Peterson aims to chart a way forward, a departure from traditional capitalist principles of wealth accumulation for its own sake. Peterson’s latest book, which was published in July and is called The Mindful Millionaire: Overcome Scarcity, Experience True Prosperity, and Create the Life You Really Want, is also not a typical personal finance book or a “get rich quick” scheme.
While there are many experts advising on how to spend the money you make in socially conscious ways or invest in sustainable enterprises, Peterson’s book focuses on healing your personal relationship with money in a more conscious way while you’re still building wealth.
After spending years focused on becoming a millionaire and achieving her goal before the age of 35, Peterson said she realized she still felt “spiritually bankrupt.”
Peterson had an awakening after two dramatic events: the murder of her father and her own brush with mortality after surviving a shooting at her doctor’s office.
As a result of her spiritual and financial journey, Peterson set up her advisory company Wealth Clinic in April 2014 after years of working as a mortgage banker and financial advisor. Thousands of people have gone through her training since then.
Her new book is part memoir, part exploration of the psychology of money, and in part also a spiritual guidebook for combatting your personal money demons and creating new, healthy habits for lasting prosperity and establishing a sense of “enough” regardless of what your bank account looks like.
Leisa Peterson writes the anti-Gordon Gekko manifesto:
a new, mindful approach to prosperity.
A Different Kind of Pandemic
Even before the pandemic hit, many Americans of all generations have not been in a great financial state. GOBankingRates survey from 2019 showed 69% of Americans had less than $1000 in savings and 45% had no savings.
“The industry has taken a very one-size-fits-all approach and did not look at the reality of the people’s situations, where they have grown up without learning these tools, their parents didn’t teach them and they didn’t learn it in school,” Peterson said in an interview. “Then it just translates into their lives.”
She was motivated to write the book to help alleviate this worry and major source of stress for many people “so they can start making better choices about money, trust themselves more and value themselves more.”
Through her work with clients as a financial advisor, she also noted how in the United States in particular there is a connection between money and self-worth.
“In the U.S. there is a great deal of self-identification about how much money you make, how good you are with it, where you came from,” she noted. “There is this belief that if we have something shameful about money, then that’s a reflection of who we truly are.”
While as a society we’re still grappling with systemic challenges, Peterson is seeing the beginning of a structural shift.
“Education, financial services, financial advising -- those are very entrenched systems that do not turn, shift and change quickly. That’s the biggest problem we’re facing,” she noted. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say that we have not educated our population on one of the most important factors in life (financial literacy). Covid-19 is amplifying and forcing these issues to become open wounds that we cannot ignore.”
Mindful Solution to Money Issues
Growing up in a turbulent home with a lot of fear and uncertainty around money, Peterson was determined to have a different financial path from her parents.
“I remember laying in bed at night, worried that the F.B.I. was going to come and take them away,” she recalled of her parents, who she knew from a young age were involved in a drug trade. “I was hustling from the age of eight on, so that I could make money and more of it. I got my mom to take me to a bank to open a checking account when I was ten.”
She hustled her way through jobs from working at McDonalds as a teenager to rising through the ranks at Wells Fargo Bank as a mortgage banker and later financial advisor. Saving aggressively along the way and investing in real estate has paid off over the years.
While she was on track in terms of her financial goals, the murder of her father caused her to reevaluate her life priorities.
“When that news came, I was already struggling deep inside, I just didn’t show it to anyone, even to myself. (I thought) ‘Just work harder, more promotions, make more money.’ And when he was killed, and it was such a horrible situation that I just collapsed,” she recalled. “What also shocked me was that I was in the middle of negotiating a really big deal (at the bank) and I literally just split into two people: one person was suffering and another a professional person, nobody was going to see me sweat. The fact that I could separate things so harshly scared me. I shut it all down, but I also knew that I was in trouble.”
What she also noted through her work with clients as both the mortgage banker and later financial advisor is that a personal relationship with money was not unique to her.
She recognized that these stories and narratives around money were often symptomatic of deep-seated patterns preventing her clients from breaking free and making progress in their financial journey.
In the book she describes a multi-faceted approach, including meditation, and examines different aspects and sources of our relationship with money such as social and family influences.
Her research also led to a different definition of prosperity and end goal. For Peterson, prosperity means a “sense that you are enough.”
What she proceeded to explain was not something that you hear often on CNBC.
“(Prosperity is) the core of your being, you’re whole and complete, it starts inside of us,” she said. “Maybe it takes many years, for me 21 years, returning to this again ‘Who am I?’ And then we realize that we’re all equal, all have the same reference of energetic systems. We’re not ignoring racisms or all the other oppressions — it’s that we must escape one level of thinking (scarcity) and rise above it. And then we go back and fix the systems, from that place.”
Most of the news headlines and protagonists of Hollywood dramas still have more in common with Gordon Gekko than Siddhartha. The mindful millionaires of tomorrow will each have to chart their own “hero’s journey.”
Luckily, the Covid-19 pandemic has presented the perfect opportunity.