My Financial Coaching Origin Story (Yes I’m Calling It That)
Every superhero has one.
A moment, sometimes quiet, sometimes catastrophic, where the ordinary version of their life ends and the real story begins. For Peter it was a spider, for Bruce, it was an alley in Gotham. For me, it was a phone call from my parents that made it very clear I was on my own.
I know. Not exactly what you pictured when you signed up for a personal finance blog.
But I'm calling this my origin story because, believe it or not, I did not spend my childhood dreaming of becoming a queer financial coach. Shocking, I know. So if you've ever wondered how someone ends up here, doing this, writing blog posts about index funds and emergency funds and the particular financial terror of being cut off by your family: this is that story.
Act One: The House Where Money Was a Lesson
I grew up in a small town in northwest Ohio watching my mom clip coupons and brag that she’d never paid money for a toothbrush.
Not as a hobby. As a strategy. My dad was grinding through medical school, and my mom was making the math work on an income that didn't have a lot of margin. I watched her turn a grocery budget into a kind of superpower — knowing exactly which store had the better deal on chicken this week, stacking coupons like a card player, making nothing stretch into something. It wasn't glamorous. But it worked.
Then my dad graduated. Got his salary. And everything changed.
We moved into a house in a golf course neighborhood in the suburbs. My parents remodeled the kitchen. They added an outdoor patio with a fireplace. The coupon-clipping years weren't forgotten — they were the foundation. And I watched my parents use what they'd learned in the lean years to make smart decisions with the good years.
For a long time, my parents also taught Financial Peace University (Dave Ramsey's personal finance curriculum) to adults in their church. I grew up watching regular people have breakthroughs about money. Watching them realize they had more power over their situation than they'd believed. Watching small, consistent financial decisions accumulate into real change over time.
I didn't know it then, but I was taking notes.
Act Two: The Bite (and the Loss)
Here's where the superhero metaphor gets a little on the nose — and also a little dark.
In the best origin stories, the hero gets two things: a power and a wound. Spider-Man gets bitten by a radioactive spider and also loses his Uncle Ben. Batman gets the detective obsession and also loses his parents in that alley. The power and the loss are usually the same event, or at least tangled together.
Mine were too.
When I came out as queer and trans, my parents withdrew their financial support. They told me that they viewed my gender-affirming care like a drug addiction. And just like that, the safety net I'd grown up assuming would always be there — gone.
Which meant I had to build my own.
I want to be honest about what that period felt like. It wasn't just hard financially. It was humiliating, in the way that only happens when people you love use money as a weapon. I watched my parents add that patio. Remodel that already-gorgeous kitchen. Thrive. And I was over here trying to figure out how to pay for my own healthcare while untangling years of internalized transphobia that had convinced me I wasn't capable of anything better than a minimum wage job at Taco Bell (a real part of my story, let’s talk about that). I had internalized the lie that I wasn't the kind of person who got to have financial security. That all of that was for someone else.
That particular lie is one I hear from so many clients I work with now.
Unfortunately, I’m not a unique case of financial struggle in the queer community. According to the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research, 73% of LGBTQ+ people said they could rely financially on their family before coming out — but only 62% could after. The gap is even larger for transgender respondents. And the average LGBTQ+ household earns about $12,580 less per year than non-LGBTQ+ households (read that number again), according to the Center for American Progress — with transgender households earning just 70 cents for every dollar non-LGBTQ+ households earn.
This is not a personal failure. It is a pattern. And the pattern has data.
Act Three: Learning to Use the Powers (Clumsily at First)
Here's the thing nobody tells you about becoming your own safety (web) net: there's a learning curve.
I made mistakes. I figured things out the hard way sometimes. I had to unpack a whole closet full of money shame — not just the internalized transphobia that told me I wasn't worthy of financial success, but the progressive guilt that whispered that wanting money was somehow selling out, that caring about my financial future was incompatible with caring about my community.
(Spoiler: it's not. In fact, the more resourced you are, the more generosity you have to give. But that's a whole other post.)
What I did have going for me was everything I'd absorbed growing up — the coupon-clipping years, the financial conversations at the kitchen table, the deep-in-my-bones understanding that small financial decisions, made consistently, add up to something real. I hadn't known I was learning it. But it was in there.
So I got to work.
I educated myself. I saved aggressively. I made intentional, strategic decisions — including using a 0% introductory APR credit card to fund my top surgery while keeping my emergency fund intact (the full story is here). My partner and I found ways to do things that felt impossible — putting me through my final college courses to finish my psychology degree, supporting me through a necessary break after burnout, paying for top surgery, our dream wedding, and a trip to Montreal all in the same year. A canoe trip. A backpacking trip. A trip to Sacramento.
I left my job in community mental health in November — not because I had to, but because we had built enough of a foundation that I could choose to. Even with leaving that job, we still grew our net worth by $30,000 last year. We are currently saving for a down payment on our first home in a blue state — somewhere we can finally exhale a little.
I am two years post top surgery. I have six months of expenses in an emergency fund. I have over $10,000 invested in the stock market. I did not do any of this with family help.
I don’t tell you my numbers to brag. I’m telling you the numbers because I’m not more special than you are or more capable of making smart money moves that have huge payoffs. It makes me someone who had access to financial knowledge — and who got lucky enough to find my way to it even when everything was working against me.
That luck is exactly the problem.
Act Four: Why This Matters Beyond Me
Here's the moment the superhero stops just surviving and starts doing something with it.
I was trained as a certified professional coach right out of college. For years I worked in community mental health, watching people carry impossible burdens — poverty, housing instability, healthcare barriers — that had financial roots. And when I looked around at the broader queer community, I kept seeing the same thing: brilliant, capable, deeply resourced-in-every-other-way people who had never been given the financial tools they needed. Who'd been cut off, or underpaid, or discriminated against, or simply never taught.
More than half of LGBTQ+ people — 51% — have less than $5,000 in savings. Twenty percent have no savings at all. LGBTQ+ adults own homes at a rate approximately 20 percentage points lower than straight and cisgender adults. Transgender women are typically paid just 60 cents for every dollar that other workers are paid. Non-binary and genderfluid people earn about 70 cents on the dollar.
This is not because queer people are bad with money. It's because the system wasn't built for us. The information was never given to us, and the safety nets that straight and cisgender people take for granted were yanked out from under many of us at the exact moment we needed them most.
Financial literacy and financial stability are power. They are freedom — to do the things you love, to travel, to leave a bad relationship or a bad job or a bad state. They are the difference between surviving and actually building the life you want. And I have watched money change not just individual lives but entire communities when it flows toward people who've been systematically excluded from it.
I don't want to be the only queer person in my circle who knows how to do this. I want to make it so that every queer and trans person who finds their way to me has access to the same tools I had to fight to find — without the fighting.
That's why I became a financial coach. That's why I’m building the Queer Money Movement. And that's why, if you're reading this, I'm glad you're here.
What Comes Next
If you're a queer or trans person who feels behind financially — who feels like security and investing and wealth-building are for someone else, for people who had an easier start — I want you to know that feeling makes complete sense given everything you've been navigating. And I also want you to know it's not the end of the story.
You can build this. I did it without a safety net. I want to help you do it with one — me, in your corner.
The Queer Money Map is my 7-month 1:1 financial coaching program for LGBTQ+ people who are starting from zero or feel like money stuff "isn't for people like me." We build your whole financial foundation together — emergency fund, debt plan, first investments, automated system — around your actual life, values, and energy. Not a generic plan. Yours.
Learn more about the Queer Money Map →
And if you're not ready for that yet — totally fine. Stick around. There's a lot more coming. New posts every week on exactly the topics they never taught us.
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You don't have to figure this out alone. That's kind of the whole point.
Elliot Bruhl (he/they) is a certified professional coach and the founder of Queer Money Movement. He helps LGBTQ+ beginners build financial security on their own terms — without shame, without jargon, and without pretending the system was built for us. Learn more at queermoneymovement.com.
Sources:
Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research (CLEAR), The LGBTQI+ Economic and Financial Survey, 2023. lgbtq-economics.org
Center for American Progress, The 2024 LGBTQI+ Wage Gap, June 2025. americanprogress.org
Morningstar / Urban Institute, Key Statistics About Income and Wealth for the U.S. LGBTQ+ Population, June 2024. morningstar.com
National Women's Law Center, Trans, Queer & Underpaid: Emerging LGBTQI+ Pay Gap Data. nwlc.org
