Wage disparities across industries are stark, especially for LGBTQ+ folks where only 1 in 25 LGBTQ+ men hold high-paying jobs compared to 1 in 7 non-LGBTQ+ men, according to Prudential’s 2018 Financial Wealth Census. With less money coming into the LGBTQ+ community than other demographics, how can the community find financial growth and success?
In this episode of Living Not So Fabulously, hosts David & John Auten-Schneider speak with Merrill Lynch financial adviser Ari Linder to explore the financial realities of choosing seemingly do-gooder careers over a financially secure one. Linder explained why LGBTQ+ folks might feel more inclined to pick career paths that have smaller paychecks. This was exactly what led Linder to pivot from social work to financial advising. “Those of us who maybe have felt like we have been at a disadvantage or discriminated against or pushed down, we want to try to solve those kinds of problems,” they explained.
In their work in as a financial adviser, Linder focuses on helping the community with unique needs. For them, being transgender has given them a deeper connection with their clients, explaining, “It’s not just about their finances; it’s about understanding the life challenges that come with being part of the LGBTQ+ community.” Don’t miss this powerful episode on how financial planning is financial freedom.
Living Not So Fabulously dives into real money stories with activists, allies, artists, tech gurus, and trailblazers in the LGBTQ+ community to give you tangible takeaways to tackle your wallet woes.
For full episodes of Living Not So Fabulously, watch on our website or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
Yahoo Finance’s Living Not So Fabulously is created and produced by Rachael Lewis-Krisky.
Video Transcript
I believe really strongly that more people in our community can and should go into finance people who know the day to day challenges of balancing transition expenses or fertility costs with also trying to do all the same things that they’re not LGBT Q neighbors are trying to do today.
We’re joined by Ari Linder.
Ari is a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch who specializes in wealth management and personal financial planning.
They were given Bank of America’s global Diversity and inclusion award.
Ari also volunteers through various nonprofits like better money habits, providing workshops for trans specific financial planning needs.
What strikes us most about this first segment with A E is how they stuck with financial services even as they came out as trans and went through the transition process, which is interesting because so many in the L TB TQ plus community have an aversion to engaging with financial services with their own money, let alone their career.
Why have we stuck with financial services through all the iterations of our career?
I think that there are a variety of reasons.
Um But I think maybe one of the biggest is that you and I saw this as a path to us having financial independence.
And we knew that if we were more financially independent, that meant that we could give back to the community, especially in a financial way.
But also I think we look at it as a way of serving the community because pretty much at some point in life, we all need some help with our money.
So Ari has a very interesting way of describing this.
Let’s see what they have to say.
Ari Linder.
Welcome to the Living.
Not so Fabulous podcast.
Thanks for inviting me in.
I’m excited to have you gonna have a meaty discussion here.
Yeah, exactly.
So in preparing for this, one of the things that John and I oftentimes think about, especially when we looked at your story is the thought that oftentimes LGBT Q folks gravitate towards careers that aren’t necessarily in high paying fields.
Um And it sounds like this was maybe something that was going on with you earlier in your career path as well.
Oh, absolutely.
I, I was uh one of those smart kids and I wanted to help people.
So my family of firemen maintenance workers, teachers are like be a nurse or how about social work?
Which sounded great.
I did go to school for social work, but unfortunately, I found out about halfway through my degree.
I did the math and I realized that there was going to be no way I could possibly pay for social work undergrad, social grad school.
And the cost of living on my own in Manhattan, I, I just, I couldn’t afford a social work degree as much as I wanted to do it.
So what triggered you to do that?
Math?
And how exactly did you do that?
I was prompted by a marketing teacher who talked about considering what we buy and what the full cost is.
Uh who influenced us to make that purchasing decision.
There are some principles I still think about today and I would probably have had to move out of New York if we didn’t have that class.
Yeah, because social work is one of those, unfortunately, those careers where you kind of have to get your masters if you want to have any upward mobility.
Is that correct?
What was the cap that you could hope to earn at that point after you got your masters at that point?
I don’t remember the exact amount, but I’d already been working in a nonprofit.
Uh, putting myself through school meant that I was working full time while going to school full time.
And I’d already been working long enough in that organization where I was on a path to be in leadership.
Getting that degree was probably gonna add 30,000 a year to my current paycheck, which was not, which did not leave a whole lot of extra.
Um, I think it was like 20 to 30.
And by the time I looked at how long it would take me to pay back that loan, how much I would have left over living in Manhattan?
It was impossible.
It’s an interesting uh discovery path that I think that many people don’t understand how to do and for that reason, they don’t help young people to actually think about going through that process.
I, I personally would think that advisor in high schools should be doing this on a regular basis.
How do you do?
How do you use the phrase?
The math was not mathing?
How do you use the math to decide whether it’s the right math for you in the career that you want to have?
There are a lot of options that you can consider if you do the work ahead and that’s where I didn’t, if you know ahead that you want to be a social worker, maybe you don’t pick a more expensive school so that the cost of education is cheaper.
I could have moved outside of New York.
Now, I would have lost the family base that also made living expenses a little bit less expensive, but I could have gone to other places at the same time.
If I wanted to live and continue to work in New York, I had to be realistic about what the future would look like.
I usually recommend that anybody who’s looking at a career change or starting education towards a career, look up things like the department of labor statistics on is this job growing?
Is this industry growing?
How many new jobs get added per year?
Because if it’s growing, but the job pool is teeny tiny, it’s going to be hard.
Right.
And then think about what your salary is going to be where you want to live.
Some people don’t need to take out loans.
I came from a blue collar family.
So I put myself through, which is a point of pride and greatness, but also made me have to check some of my choices.
So what was it that attracted to you too?
That was it the family background that attracted you to social work?
No, I wanted to help people with hard things and I love the puzzle of trying to figure it out.
I also was on a robotics team in high school, but I didn’t think I was a smart kid because I thought, well, smart people are the people who think math is easy.
And so if math takes any effort from me, I just must not be smart.
And that shaped what I chose for myself and what I looked into.
I can’t tell you how many super smart people come to me today as clients, leaders of massive companies making some amazing money who don’t know how to look at their personal finances and tell me I’m just, I’m bad at math.
I’m just, I’m just not smart enough for this.
Well, you absolutely are.
You are a sea level leader here.
You, you’re OK, you just haven’t had someone explain it to you in a way that you can understand.
Once I realized that I was actually smart enough and I could actually do this, I took some more economics courses and thought, ok, this is not so bad.
I realized that I could go into finance and a friend who was working at Merrill had been telling me I just did this wonderful thing for a family, prepared their situation and saved them like a ridiculous amount of money by strategizing.
I thought that sounds a little bit like fancy social work.
Yeah, we’re definitely going to dive into that.
I want to peel back the onion a little bit though.
I’m curious to what degree do you think you being LGBT Q informed that original career decision trying to pursue a career?
That was a little bit more altruistic maybe than what the typical perception is of financial services.
Well, some of it was lack of role models.
You know, I had never seen an engineer, never mind seeing a professional who is also a comfortable successful person anywhere in the LGBT Q community.
So I didn’t know it was possible for me and then I wanted to help people and I know that our community really has this as a strong personal value.
And if I’m going about my life, I’m also looking for places where I can repair the world where I can fix the little social injustices.
It’s hard not to want to do that growing up as a kid knowing that you’re LGBT Q. Yeah, I think that there is a natural attraction for us.
Um Those of us who maybe have felt like we have been at a disadvantage or discriminated against or pushed down, we want to try to solve those kinds of problems.
And so we go into that kind of mode of this is what I’m going to do to quote unquote, save the world or change the world, right?
And so we look for careers that allow us to do that.
And oftentimes that means that we don’t necessarily think about how other careers besides the ones that are kind of the banner careers of saving the world or changing the world, how they can also change the world.
I couldn’t have said it better, I believe really strongly that more people in our community can and should go into finance specifically, they should go into financial planning or becoming a fiduciary financial advisor.
Our community needs more people who care more people who are community minded, more people who know the day to day challenges of balancing transition expenses or fertility costs with also trying to do all the same things that they’re not LGBT Q neighbors are trying to do.
So, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here.
Financial services is like Gordon Gecko and greed is good and that’s all I care.
About, is that, am I correct or what is your experience?
How is that different?
You’re not wrong.
I had a serious identity check.
My first two years at Merrill thinking, am I doing something wrong?
Because like all my friends and nonprofits are, are like, oh, you got the big corporate job now and yeah, and corporate benefits are fantastic.
Paid for my top surgery.
Thank you, Meryl.
And we, we belong in all of the places, not just nonprofits.
It’s not a bad thing to want to do well for yourself financially.
We often give unless your cup is overflowing.
Otherwise you’re just depleting from yourself and you’re not necessarily helping the community net net, right?
You have to be overflowing and be able to give to other people.
Exactly.
We don’t want to put more burden on our nonprofits by not taking care of ourselves and needing to be rescued.
If we do well, then we can support those nonprofits and help others in our community.
So did you catch that Ari describes being a financial advisor or doing financial planning as fancy financial social work, right?
And that may be one of the reasons why it might be a good fit for more LGBT Q folks who want to give back to the community to actually get into financial services because they are giving back to the community with that.
We’ll be right back after this break.
Welcome back.
I really connect with Ari’s story about not having this attraction to financial services because they weren’t necessarily inherently Mathy.
And as you know, I’m not Mathy, I’m not good at number crunching calculators.
Scare me at night.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily, you’re not good with math.
I think maybe you have dyscalculia, which is kind of like with numbers.
Exactly.
So, when my father recommended that I get into financial services initially, when I was young, I was like, no, I’m just not who I am, but there are so many different kinds of careers you can follow in financial services.
That isn’t about just providing financial advice, right?
But even if you are a financial advisor, remember sometimes you’re a therapist, sometimes you’re a life coach.
But there’s other things that you can do in financial services.
For example, if you’re an artist, maybe going into marketing or communications, I think there’s a lot of different ways to look at financial services as a way to get stability financially in your life.
So with that, let’s look at the second part of Ari’s interview, this idea that you bring up that uh when we do well, we can help others do well.
And I think that that’s one of the things that we often forget is that there, there’s this whole other side of helping people that does cost money, right?
There’s the good work of doing things actively engaging with individuals, the boots on the ground, that kind of thing.
But there is the financial side.
And as a community, we need to be able to support that side of the community with our dollars.
So that means we do need individuals in the community who are willing and are able to support financially as well as do some of that other stuff.
Oh, absolutely.
And there are advanced moves that people who have access to wealth and tools are able to use to get different kinds of progress faster.
Ok. Advanced moves.
Tell me more of that.
Yeah.
Well, things like, you know, I’ve coming to mind are two different clients.
Uh, one client who has access to a house, access to some investments and a massive amount of, of debt.
They’ve got a household with 26 figure incomes and a six figure bucket of debt.
But because they have a house and some other tools, they are able to refinance their debt, pay it down, fast, pay it down cheaper and it’s not going to be a big burden for them indefinitely.
I’ve also spoken with people who are earlier in careers, don’t yet have a lot of other choices.
And for them, you know, snowball method is magic when we’re talking about paying off debt, but it can only move so fast without some other big financial pieces in place.
Absolutely.
So can you provide our listeners and viewers a little bit more of a perspective of what your day to day job looks like?
I have people come to me all the time who are stressed, losing sleep in real pain because they don’t know what could possibly change to fix the really shameful, heavy debt that they’re struggling with.
So we need to teach each other, we need to teach ourselves and that, that takes time.
That’s a privilege.
I feel like when I get to the end of every day, I ask myself, OK, was I a good adviser today?
And if I can think about times when I made somebody’s day easier or I made someone have a little bit more hope.
I’m like, yeah, yeah, I was financial planning is financial and planning, right?
There’s so many financial advisors we hear or speak with, they are solely focused on the financial side, not focused on the planning side.
And without the two working together, you’re not going to have a good financial plan or future, right?
So what was it that actually drew you to this idea of being a financial advisor and said, I’m, I’m going to not hear the voices of the community on one shoulder telling me not to do this and the voices on the other side financially.
Yeah.
Selling out um trading in your ideals for the dollars.
It felt hard.
I was working in nonprofits for 13 years before Merrill.
I know I look young.
It’s a good thing and little by little regulation there made me have to make choices for people to check off regulatory boxes and as a person in nonprofits who’s doing it to help people, you’re like, oh, do we really have to do that for that person?
That person doesn’t need this thing.
Then I had someone I knew who was working at Merrill who had this big life saving thing for a family.
And I thought that sounds like it’s really helpful and it sounds like the family is in a better place because you were there.
I think anybody can start taking some economics courses or looking online.
Like, thank goodness there’s so much you can do to educate yourself and it feels empowering once you see the changes happen and you often times when you get hired by a broker dealer or a financial advisory firm, um they’ll help pay for the training and put you through the curriculum to get the education and the licenses and the registrations that you need is that was that your experience?
It was mine.
I know nowadays a lot of broker dealers, a lot of different firms are hiring, there may be a need to take a test or exam first.
Luckily there are lots of programs and things out there to help you take that exam, the exams everyone are, are usually like pretty hard on purpose.
And then once you get into the industry, there are a lot of different trainings and supports.
I recommend that folks look at a place with a really good training program that’s not just sales focused, but also more planning focused.
And uh also if you can look for things that are less about commission, because I really believe our industry is for the right reasons.
Moving more to the fee based fee only models where it’s easier for us to make sure that we’re all operating more altruistically in our choices.
So, do you see a lot of people like you in financial services?
No, I’m actually the first that Meryl knows of out trans financial advisor.
And I thought that that was strange.
I thought for sure there must be other firms.
Uh but I was at the out and Equal conference last year, big workplace conference.
And after I announced on stage, I’m the first for Merrill, a lot of the big other firms came up to me and I thought I was going to hear, you know, you should be with us and instead I heard how are you doing that?
We don’t have anyone yet and we think it’s because there’s no process yet.
And yes, you’re right.
So why does it matter?
Why does it matter that you’re, you’re out there at the forefront and you’re one of the first people doing this, especially at Merrill, why does it matter?
And what can you share with the community to encourage more people to think about doing this?
There’s the first level of when I know I’m talking to somebody else in the LGBT Q community who accepts the fact that I’m non binary or transgender, it becomes not an issue and it means I can actually focus on the other parts of me that I promise are so much more interesting.
Right.
It’s not the best thing about me when you can talk to somebody about who you are and know that you don’t have to continuously train them on how to use your pronouns.
Or if you’re a person who has maybe a trans child and that person doesn’t know to not use that name anymore.
It’s just all these little unpleasant moments and finance is hard enough as it is.
You know, if we can just get that out of the way, first of all, like base layer that’s helpful.
But then there are other things too that our community needs that might not be top of mind for someone who has only worked with one trans person their entire life.
Right.
So things like when you transition for me, it was really important to have money saved because I wasn’t sure if I was going to lose clients and I did, I wasn’t sure if I was going to have business slow.
It did and I wasn’t sure if I was going to need to do more expensive things than I had planned, even with all the research that I did ahead of time and I did, it was more expensive.
I know that because I’ve gone through it.
Someone might know that if they’re in our community and they’ve got friends or they’ve heard about it, an advisor who’s never worked with someone like me might not feel comfortable asking important questions.
Like are you gonna need to get a recliner or uh a different wedge pillow or something to support you during uh your transition week?
So, you know, are there any meal services that you need to set up for yourself when you know, you know what to ask and then I can help protect differently?
Yeah, as you were talking about that, I’m thinking about this, you know, we use this, this acronym KYC in, in the industry, right?
KYC stands for know your client and know your client isn’t just that you know them by face and you know, know their social security number and their name and all that matches and everything like knowing your client, especially for financial advisors truly means do I know enough about my client so that I can actually help them plan out their lives and their financial life?
So I, I really appreciate you bringing this up.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for coming on and sharing your story.
We want to see more LGBT Q plus people in financial services, not only so that they can be wealthy and do more good in the world, but we want to see more LGBT Q plus people be able to serve the community in a more authentic way that it seems like you’re doing before we close.
You did have an invitation.
I think that you wanted to share with us.
Oh, for sure.
And uh you give me grace if I wind up getting overwhelmed with uh with uh requests here.
But if you’re looking to join the financial industry, if you’re not sure what this all looks like, if you need someone like I did to show you what it looks like.
Contact me.
I’m on linkedin.
I’m happy to talk with you and make sure that you can find like the best first couple of steps for yourself.
Thank you.
I love that interview with Ari.
They more descriptively share with us why it is we need more LGBT Q folks in financial services.
Exactly.
This is why we wrote that article in Forbes several years ago, encouraging more transgender folks to get into financial services.
In that article, we cited that transgender folks are four times more likely than the general population to live in a household that earns less than $10,000 a year.
And what’s shocking about that is the fact that 47% of transgender folks have a college degree or higher, which is well, more than the general population.
Yeah.
And with about a third of financial advisor planning on retiring in the next 10 years, there’s a lot of open doors for folks who are looking for careers and the average base pay for those positions is about $88,000 And then when you consider the fact that there are roughly 1.6 million transgender individuals in the United States over the age of 13, it is a huge opportunity for financial services companies to welcome these individuals into their companies as employees and also authentically connect with the community by serving their financial needs.
Exactly.
So thank you for joining us until next time.
Stay fabulous.
This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.
