The Financial Confessions · The Financial Diet

Growing Up Poor: When "Good" Money Advice Doesn't Apply

July 15, 2024·55 min·5 clips

Jessica describes arguing with a bureaucrat over how the military broke her to secure disability payments.

The Financial Confessions is produced by The Financial Diet, an independently owned media company focused on personal finance. Host Chelsea Fagan explains that Jessica Audebier was selected for this episode because she fits multiple categories of people whose financial situations the show's regular viewers had specifically requested coverage of: military veteran, PTSD survivor, person with ADHD, legally disabled. The conversation begins with Audebier explaining why so much financial advice feels inapplicable: her ADHD means she lacks a reliable sense of time, making bill payment schedules functionally impossible to maintain. Her military service involved shift schedules that further disrupted any sense of consistent routine. She frames this not as a complaint about the advice-givers but as a structural mismatch between prescriptions built for stable circumstances and lives that are inherently unstable. Audebier then recounts her background. Her mother came from a wealthy household but was never taught money management; her father was also from a poor background and joined the military. Both parents were unable to manage money, and her mother ended up with custody of the children despite having no financial capacity or psychological stability. Audebier, as the oldest child, found herself having to generate money in ways that were, as she puts it, not legal, fair, good, or any of those things — she invites listeners to apply their own trigger warnings to this section. When she joined the military herself, seeking the structure she had never had, she began developing financial skills. But she was sexually assaulted within the military, which undid the foundation she was building. Each time she tried to build financial stability, an external shock — trauma, assault, systemic failure — toppled the structure. The episode functions as a document of how conventional financial advice is premised on stability that not all people have access to.

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