Breaking Stereotypes, roooted Provides Resources for Women by Women on Financial Responsibility

You reluctantly wake up, get dressed, and prepare to start your day of work or class. You sit down for breakfast and read the daily paper or check your phone for missed messages. Amid scrolling through the abundance of emails from online stores that you forgot to unsubscribe to, you remember its Monday. You get excited as you remember what that means, an email from roooted is awaiting your read. 

Roooted is a weekly newsletter and community that focuses on all things money. Ilana Seidl, a recent graduate of Tulane University, along with her partner Eve Halimi, founded roooted with the goal of making financial responsibility ‘normal’ and ‘cool’ and finding ways to insert these important topics and conversations into relatable language.

“Last summer I started going down this rabbit hole of realizing how important money is, which sounds kind of dumb at first because most people are like ‘Oh yeah, well of course money is important,’ but I think I just realized that I hadn’t learned a lot of really important things about money and was even afraid of it and talking about,” Ilana Seidl explained. 

Instead of letting this idea be purely imagination she decided to bring her vision to life.

Now, roooted has around 1100 subscribers. With this many subscribers, it can be easy to lose  intimacy, so Ilana uses the platform to foster a community using interactive techniques and providing space for questions and comments.

“We also always keep in mind that people’s attention spans are relatively short and that no one really likes getting emails, so we try to make it a fun email to receive and something that people actually want to read”, Seidl said. Ultimately, she wants people to genuinely be interested in learning about money, rather than it feeling like a daunting chore.

The newsletter covers a variety of topics.

“We first try to do some kind of financial term or subject [ranging from] talking about taxes or an emergency fund or what impact investing is, and then breaking it down to make it really easy to understand,” Seidl said.

Seidl’s favorite subject that they’ve focused on was investing, citing her friends’ recent investments and growth as payoff. 

“I really didn’t think it was for me. I thought investing was something you did if you had a lot of money. It seemed like this exclusive thing where you wear ties and it’s all fancy, but really, it's not,” Seidl said. “There are so many different tools, apps, and websites out there and you can invest as little as a dollar.” 

Each issue of roooted also puts forth current events and ties back to what's going on in the world. 

“There’s always so much going on and sometimes it can be hard to understand why it's important [...] so we just try to emphasize why it all matters,” Seidl explained. “Whether it has to do with money or just being a responsible human being they are things we all should know.”

In terms of COVID-19, they knew how overwhelming it could get when everyone was talking about the same thing and there were different things being said on different platforms. Roooted took time to focus on safety measures and precautions while also explaining how the economy had been affected.

Seidl also personally felt like she was compelled to shed light on the Black Lives Matter movement. 

“We’ve found that our platform has been really impactful thus far. It's central to everything that we are doing to talk about what is going on and how to support the movement, while amplifying Black voices and doing the work that needs to be done. We are really dedicated to doing just that”.

Seidl recognizes that on the outside people might not think that the BLM movement is related to money. However, she recognizes the parallelism of the two topics.

“At the end of the day, the way you choose to spend your money, the way that you invest, and the way that you make your money all ends up having to do with the impact that you make on society,” Seidl said. “Money is power. People always say it’s like voting with your dollars, and it’s that kind of thing that makes it so important to talk about especially with women and women of color.”

It doesn’t just stop at reading. Roooted has successfully hosted events such as a financial literacy panel and a financial literacy mindful event at Tulane University. With the notion of normalizing the subject, the mindful event consisted of having conversations about money while guests made their own succulent pots.

Seidl really wants to empower women to join the conversation about money, rather than staying in the shadows about it. 

“[Not long ago] women in the U.S. were not even allowed to have credit cards in their name. So, it’s never really been a part of the female conversation because by law we weren’t allowed to have that,” she explained. “I think that it has this trickle-down effect that now women say they aren’t interested or even genuinely are uninterested because it's never been available to them”. 

Having their own money gives women the power to be independent, which Seidl recognizes hasn’t always been the case for women. She feels that the main mission of roooted is empowering the people and spreading the word.  

“I hope to take it a step further and encourage people to have these conversations with their friends and truly realize the importance of financial literacy and of being responsible and aware of what’s happening with their money,” Seidl said. 

It’s never too late to join the conversation. If you want to subscribe to roooted, you can do so here.

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