Money, Mutual Aid, and the Kind of Safety You Can’t Build Alone
A client told me that holding six months of expenses in cash felt like hoarding. It forced me to rethink what financial “security” actually is—and who it’s for.
Most financial advice is built for an individual or a nuclear family trying to wall itself off from risk. But a lot of people—especially people rooted in community—don’t see money that way. This is a story about one of those people, and how their view of mutual aid pushed me to widen my own definition of a safety net. Photo Credit: Leo Patrizi
Every now and then a client says something that makes me realize I’ve been carrying around an assumption I didn’t even know was there. This happened recently with a client who is deeply involved in their local community. They give money directly to people who need it, drop off food when someone is sick, help friends pay for housing when they’re between jobs—just very ordinary, very human mutual aid. In one of our first conversations they described it in a way I loved: in their circle it wasn’t really that “Dana needs $20.” It was more like “there are $20 floating around in the group and they’ll land where they’re needed.” Money wasn’t this private, sealed thing that belonged to one person; it was a resource that moved among people who cared about one another.
At the time I clocked it as “that’s a great way to talk about generosity” and then went back to building their plan like I normally would—emergency fund, retirement savings, cash-flow tweaks, all the usual things. When I delivered the plan, I recommended what I recommend to almost everyone: build up several months of expenses in a dedicated savings account so that one bad month doesn’t throw off the whole year. They listened, nodded, and then said, very kindly, “I can do that… but honestly, that amount of money just sitting there would feel like hoarding when I know people around me need help.”
That sentence landed harder than I expected. Because they weren’t rejecting the idea of being responsible. They weren’t saying, “I don’t want to save.” They were saying, “This advice assumes money is meant to sit with me until I personally need it. But I don’t actually live that way.” And they were right—the plan I’d written was built around an individualistic model of safety: protect yourself first, protect your partner, protect your household, and then, if there’s extra, you can give. Their lived model was: we protect one another as we go.
It made me think back to a woman I worked with years ago at an online financial firm. She ran the company’s Latinx employee group and once pointed out that our software invited users to save for retirement, buying a house, or funding college, but made no mention of helping family, supporting parents or generally being the person others can turn to. In her culture those were real financial goals, not side effects. Leaving them out didn’t make people stop doing them; it just meant the tool was pretending a big part of real life didn’t exist. That’s sort of what I was doing with this client: pretending their web of mutual responsibility wasn’t already part of her financial life.
Most of the personal finance advice I grew up with comes out of a very particular worldview: that the basic unit you’re trying to protect is the individual or the nuclear family, that the right move is to build a wall high enough that whatever chaos is out there can’t reach you, and that the way to do that is to accumulate enough assets that you no longer have to need anyone. That vision is so normal we rarely notice it. But it’s not the only way people experience money. There are whole communities—queer folks, immigrant families, disabled mutual-aid networks, religious communities—where the expectation is that money and care move outward and back again. You help because someone helped you, or will help you, or would help you if you needed it. It’s not fuzzy or naïve; it’s a different kind of balance sheet.
And here’s the funny thing: I’ve also seen the exact opposite extreme. Very wealthy families where money is available, but only in opaque, tightly controlled ways. There’s a patriarch or matriarch somewhere holding the real numbers, and the adult kids know there’s money for college, or a house, or a medical situation, but they don’t quite know how much, or when, or whether it comes with strings. On paper, that’s intergenerational support. In practice, it can feel disempowering. You’re safe, technically, but only on terms you don’t set. Compared to that, my client’s “$20 floating around” model suddenly looked very clean: I have it, you need it, here. No theater, no control, no pretending.
So what do you do as a planner when someone says “your version of safety feels like hoarding”? You don’t drop the idea of a safety net altogether; that would be irresponsible, and they knew that. What we did was make the plan more flexible. We talked about creating a dedicated savings account for emergencies and said, “Let’s just see how this feels as it grows.” I told them, “Yes, in my perfect-world spreadsheet we’d get this to X dollars. But if you get to Y and your gut says, ‘this is more than I can hold while people around me are struggling,’ then that’s data too. We can pause contributions. We can redirect them to the mutual aid you’re already doing. We can build your net and your community’s net at the same time.” In other words, we stopped treating the standard advice as sacred and started treating their values as real constraints.
This whole conversation reminded me of earlier this year when, right after Donald Trump’s most recent inauguration, I heard from several clients who were rattled by the political climate. Some asked about moving to cash; others asked about buying gold or crypto or even land in upstate New York, the classic “if things really go south I’ll head there” plan. Underneath all of it was this same question: “How do I make myself safe from whatever is coming?” And my honest answer was: “To a point, we can adjust your portfolio. But if what you’re worried about is true social breakdown, there is no mutual fund or rural cabin that makes you totally safe.” If the rule of law goes away, if institutions stop working, if the grid is unreliable, your brokerage account is not your lifeline. Your people are.
That’s why I keep circling back to interdependence. A lot of the “prepper” style solutions are closed systems—me and my spouse in a fortified house with our own food and our own power and maybe a second passport. That might work for some scenarios, but it’s also lonely, brittle, and honestly a little optimistic about your ability to keep everyone else out. In a world with fewer functioning systems, the people who know their neighbors, who trade childcare, who can call someone for a ride, who know who has medical training, who’ve already built trust—that’s the group I’d want to be in. Mutual aid isn’t just kindness; it’s risk management.
And even if nothing collapses (which is the outcome I am rooting for), the community-first way of living is better in the meantime. I didn’t really start getting to know my neighbors or getting involved in local stuff until my 30s. Before that, “success” to me looked like nicer trips, nicer restaurants, owning a home, maybe one day a beach house. Now, if you told me I could have all that but I’d miss the backyard barbecues, the tennis drop-ins, the weird little town political meetings, the people who know my wife’s and my names—I’d hesitate. Not just because those things are less expensive sources of fulfillment (they are), but because they make daily life feel full. They also make generosity easier because you can see who needs what.
That’s the connection my client helped me see: when you center relationships, both your spending and your saving get clearer. You don’t need as much performative lifestyle stuff when you’re already busy living a life. And when someone you love needs help, you don’t have to ask whether mutual aid “fits the budget.” That’s part of the point of money.
So no, I’m not abandoning the idea of an emergency fund. If you work with me, I will probably still recommend you build one. But I’m holding it more loosely now. I’m making more room for people whose safety net already includes actual humans. I’m trying not to assume that the healthiest financial life is the one that makes you the least dependent on other people. For some of us, the healthiest financial life is the one that makes us more connected, more able to give, more able to receive, and more confident that if something goes wrong there are several people we can text. That’s not hoarding. That’s a different shape of security: one I’m still learning from the people I’m supposed to be advising.
