I grew up in a home where money was never talked about — not because there wasn't any, but because money carried too much weight to touch directly. My parents didn't have the language for it. Nobody taught them. And so they passed down what they had: avoidance, secrecy, a low-grade financial anxiety that lived in the walls of the house like humidity.
What I know now — and didn't have words for then — is that this is what financial trauma looks like in a family. It doesn't always look like dramatic debt or crisis. Sometimes it looks like a parent who controls every purchase and tells you nothing. Sometimes it looks like a household where money is always "fine" until suddenly it isn't. Sometimes it looks like a house that slowly fills with things nobody can let go of, because letting go of anything feels too much like losing something you couldn't afford to lose.
My parents' house looks like that last one. I'm going to inherit it someday — the literal contents of a life spent holding on. And I've had to make peace with the fact that I'm also inheriting the patterns underneath it, unless I do the work to interrupt them.
Why I started this
I have three young kids. They watch me the way I watched my parents — not the things I say about money, the things I do. Whether I open the bills or let them pile up. Whether money is something we talk about at the table or something that happens behind closed doors. Whether they see us plan, or panic.
I started Unbroken Money because I couldn't find what I was actually looking for: something that addressed the emotional layer underneath the financial advice. Every budgeting resource assumed I just needed a better spreadsheet. But I didn't have a spreadsheet problem. I had a patterns problem. A nervous system problem. A "this is what money meant in my house growing up" problem.
The financial work and the healing work are the same work. You can't do one without the other — and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't tried to build a budget while also unlearning thirty years of what money meant in the house you grew up in.
What this space is
Unbroken Money is for adults who grew up in homes where money was avoided, weaponized, hoarded, or simply never talked about — and who are now doing the work their parents didn't do, for the kids who are watching them do it.
I write and record under the name Jordan. This is a private practice built alongside a professional life, and I keep the two deliberately separate. What I bring here is real — the story, the work, the weekly habits — but I protect my identity to protect my family and my career. I think you can respect that, especially if you're here because you understand something about what it means to carry two versions of yourself at once.
What I believe
Financial dysfunction and emotional dysfunction travel together. Narcissistic and emotionally immature parenting doesn't just hurt kids emotionally — it teaches them something about money, worth, scarcity, and what they deserve. Untangling that takes more than a debt payoff plan. It takes the debt payoff plan and the inner work, running at the same time.
And it's possible. I'm doing it. Imperfectly, weekly, in the middle of a busy life with three kids who are already inheriting something different than what I got.
That's the whole point.