The Buffalo Stance — Stop Running From Your Money

Josefina Bonilla Velez: When a storm is coming, buffalo turn and charge straight into it. Cows run the other way, but cows cannot outrun storms. They stay in them longer. That is what avoidance like with money. You move around it. You tell yourself you will look at it later and later turns into pressure. Then the pressure turns into something you don't want to Face at all. I was a cow. I can't believe I said that I was a cow for years in my financial life I was absolutely 100 % a cow I avoided money stuff for so long that by the time it caught up with me and it did catch up with me I was so far behind that just looking at it felt like an emergency Which made me want to look at it even less which is exactly the kind of logic that makes total sense when you are in it it sounds insane when you say it out loud. ⁓ Josefina Bonilla-Velez and this is Money and Motion. So today I wanna talk about the Buffalo Stance ⁓ it actually means to turn towards something you have been running from and why. If you are a woman over 50, who has spent years, maybe decades, telling yourself not a person. This is the most important turn you will ever make. Let me describe her to you. She is competent, genuinely competent. She things, manages things, fixes things. knows when something is wrong and she handles it. except this one category, except money. Money is the thing she has been meaning to get to, the thing that goes in the drawer. The retirement statement comes in the mail, she moves them to the pile, the pile becomes the drawer, and the drawer stays closed. She is not irresponsible. That is genuinely important to say. She pays her bills. She shows up. She is the person other people call when things go wrong. She just made a quiet, private agreement with herself that money was not her department. And that agreement gets renewed every single month quietly, without drama, without even a conscious decision. She did not arrive at, I am not a money person. That story came from somewhere, from watching who handled money in her house growing up, from being told explicitly or just by the way rooms went quiet that this was not her domain. And then she said it out loud. I have never been good with numbers. Like it is an eye color, like it is fixed. I am clumsy. I forget names. I am not. money person. Same category, no urgency. What that framing does is it makes the avoidance feel reasonable. If it is who you are, you cannot really be expected to do anything about it. The identity is a very clean excuse and it costs an absolute fortune. There is research on this that's stopped cold Financial avoidance and financial scarcity reinforce each other ⁓ time. Not just correlate, reinforce. The less you look, the more accumulates. The more accumulates, the harder it is to look. It is a loop and it has a direction and the direction is down. She opens the bank app, the number starts loading and she closes it. Not dramatically, she does not slam anything. She just closes it and it opens something else. She still knows the number is in there. She is going to carry it around all day. That is what avoidance actually looks like. Not denial, just not today, every day, not today. Here is the part she skips. Half of women between 55 and 66 have no personal retirement savings. Zero. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, and if you have something, even a little, you're already ahead of half the room. But ahead of that benchmark is not the same as okay. She already knows she is behind. The avoidance is not keeping her from knowing. She knows. She feels it. It is just easier not to have it confirmed in an exact number. So she carries the dread around instead this low constant ambient dread that shows up on Sunday nights. And every time someone mentions retirement or retiring and every time she makes that joke, I will just work until I drop. It is funny, except she says that a little too fast. She gets a birthday dinner invitation from a friend who just retired. She feels something, not quite jealousy, more like vertigo. She texts back, so excited for you, and then sits in her car for a second. Bankrate found that 82 % of retired women rely on social security as their primary income, not a supplement, their main source. Social security was not designed to be a salary. It was designed to be a floor. She is building a retirement on a floor that was never meant to hold the whole weight, especially my weight. Every month she does not look is a month of compounding. She does not get back. Time is the only ingredient she actually cannot replace. Here is what eventually had to understand. The not a money person thing was never about money. It was about not wanting to find out how bad it was. It was protection. The buffalo does not charge the storm because it is not scared. It charges because it figured out that running alongside the storm is the worst option, not the scary option, the worst one. The storm is coming regardless. You do not get to vote on whether it arrives. You only get to decide how long you stay inside it. The woman who opens that account and sees the number does not feel better because the number is good. Often it is not. She feels better because she stopped being a person who does not look. That shift in identity is the first deposit and it changes everything that comes after. Here are three things to do starting today. First, open the retirement account, the one you have not opened. Find the balance. Write it on a piece of paper, not a spreadsheet, not a notes app, a piece of paper. Write the number, write the date, and write your name at the top like it belongs to you, because it does. It is not a project. It is one number on one piece of paper. She opens the laptop on a Wednesday night, takes four tries to get that password right. Resets it, is briefly very annoyed, logs in, sees the number, writes it down. $14,000. Says it out loud, and that part matters. And then makes a cup of coffee. She did not fix anything, but Thursday, she is different. She is a woman who looked. Second, rewrite the story. Write down, I am not a money person. And next to it, write, that was a behavior, not a fact. Then write one thing you have done that required financial competence. Negotiated a salary, got out of debt, bought a car by yourself, raised kids on one income, kept the household running on not enough for years. There's always something. Write it down. This is not affirmations. It's not about affirmations. This is an evidence review. Identity is built on evidence. Before someone asks about retirement and she does the laugh, ⁓ God, I do not even want to think about it. After the same question, she says, I am working on it. Not confident, not an expert, just working on it. sounds and is different. Third, you are already in the storm. Set up a $50 automatic contribution, not $500, just $50. Call it Buffalo Money. If your employer does not offer a plan, a Roth IRA takes about 20 minutes to open online. Same $50, same move. Go to the AARP retirement calculator and run two versions. One where you start now and one where you wait two more years. That is what choosing costs you in actual dollars. At 52 or 58 or 63, you still have more compounding runway than you think. But only if you start now. You are never not. money person. You were a person who learned to look away and now you know the difference. Take that buffalo stance, write that number and turn around. You were strong enough for this a long time ago. You just didn't know it. I'm Josefina Bonilla-Velez and this is Money and Motion. We can't go back but we can move forward together.