Upcoming Event!How Can Mindfulness Help You Reach Financial Independence?Do you want to reduce money anxiety, but don’t know who to trust?Would you like to learn how to set up and manage your own retirement plan?Do you want to know how we create a passive income stream you can’t outlive?If yes, join us and learn how to answer the 4 critical financial independence questions:Am I on track for financial independence?What do I need to do to get on track?How do I design a mindful investing portfolio?How do I manage that portfolio and my income over time through changing markets?Learn more: https://courses.mindful.money/financial-independence-bootcampAja Evans is a board-certified therapist, speaker, and writer who is focused on financial well being. After ten years in a mental health practice, she noticed the emotional impact of how people interact with their money, especially black people. She saw reflections of her own journey to financial literacy and her own reckoning with her relationship with money and sought additional training. Today, Aja joins the show to share how she has made assisting people at the intersection of mental health and money a pillar of her work.? Watch on YouTubehttps://youtu.be/KKtqSn-42jIKey Takeaways00:58 – Jonathan introduces today’s guest, Aja Evans, who joins the show to discuss her earliest memories of money and entrepreneurship and her path to becoming a financial therapist09:42 – Accumulating debt versus not saving money13:56 – Unfortunate financial statistics surrounding the black community25:34 – Aja speaks to how she works with financial advisors29:07 – Financial anxiety32:24 – Money, guilt, shame, and secrecy35:52 – Generational wealth39:25 – How Aja works with her clients on their financial stress43:42 – One piece of financial advice to heed and one thing to completely ignore47:13 – Aja talks about her upcoming book47:53 – The last thing Aja changed her mind about and the one question that Aja would want to know the answer to50:32 – Jonathan thanks Aja for joining the show today and lets listeners know where to connect with herTweetable Quotes“I was going into debt and feeling really awful about myself and awful about my money because I just did not understand how I could be making what I felt like was so much money, and not be able to afford my lifestyle. And that was the first time that I really had to have a financial reckoning with lifestyle versus how much income you have and what does that look like and where does it come from.” (08:04) (Aja)“I didn’t really have any direction, I think is the best way to put it, in terms of what I was trying to do. It was a lot of looking at how people were paying off debt, whether that was debt snowball or avalanche, it was just the stories of people. So, it wasn’t necessarily, ‘Hey, here are each of the steps.’ It was the stories that people were paying off debt and how interesting that was. And I just realized that people weren’t talking about it and felt really bad about it.” (13:04) (Aja)“When it comes to the black community, historically there haven't been as many opportunities to create wealth. And, because of that, that means that there isn’t as much wealth to be passed on. That is not to say that there are not black people who are extremely wealthy; there are. But, as an overall collective as a population, we have less wealth than our white counterparts.” (15:37) (Aja)“What I have found is that people want to be...