Peggy Haslach - Planning For Good

Thank you, Dien Yuen (Daylight), for sharing these two important reads: Human Rights Campaign's 2024 LGBTQ+ Financial Wellness Report and PWM's piece on building inclusive wealth services for non-traditional families.

The numbers should stop all of us in financial services in our tracks:

Nearly half (48.1%) of LGBTQ+ adults say they are not doing well financially. That's almost double the rate of the general U.S. population (26.9%). For transgender and non-binary adults, it's 60.4%.

And 3 in 10 LGBTQ+ adults report experiencing discrimination while simply trying to access financial services. Those who have are more than twice as likely to be struggling financially.

What often gets overlooked: LGBTQ+ seniors face an even bigger disparity. More than 70% of LGBTQ+ adults 65+ have household incomes below $75K, and they're more likely to be aging alone, without children, without traditional family safety nets, and often without estate plans built for chosen family.

Here's the thing: those outcomes at 65 are shaped by decades of missed planning opportunities. If we can provide LGBTQ+ people with access to inclusive financial planning earlier in life, before retirement is on the doorstep, we can change what aging looks like for the next generation of LGBTQ+ seniors.

This is exactly who Planning for Good, LLC serves and why I am on the board of GenPride. We believe it does not need to be this way. When LGBTQ+ individuals and families get proper, inclusive financial planning early, with planners who understand chosen family, non-traditional households, and the legal and estate complexities that come with them, the gap can close before it compounds.

To my fellow planners: if you want to be part of the solution, the Foundation for Financial Planning's pro bono program makes it easy to volunteer your skills for people in crisis or need. A few hours of your expertise can change the trajectory of someone's financial life.

Financial wellness is not a privilege. It's something everyone deserves access to.

Links to both reports, GenPride and FFP's volunteer page are in the comments 👇

Photo of me getting ready to march in the Seattle Pride Parade with GenPride.

Paying your mortgage every two weeks instead of monthly could knock years off your loan. See the numbers and decide if bi-weekly payments make sense for you.

Bi-Weekly Mortgage Payments See how switching to bi-weekly mortgage payments could reduce interest and shorten your loan.

At Planning For Good, part of how we serve our LGBTQ+ clients is staying on top of moments like this. Legal and political shifts hit real financial decisions: estate planning, family recognition, how safe it feels to plan a future here. So we read the fine print. Here's what came out of the Supreme Court this week, and why it matters to us.

This week the Supreme Court closed out its term, and if you work in or near the LGBTQ+ community like we do, you felt all of it.

The headline: SCOTUS struck down Trump's executive order trying to end birthright citizenship. 6-3, Roberts writing the majority. Not as big of a win as it should have been, but a win nonetheless and one worth sitting with for a second.

But don't get comfortable. In the same ruling, Kavanaugh left the door cracked open for Congress to take another run at it. This isn't over.

The same week, the Court:

→ Let Trump fire independent agency heads at will, gutting a 90-year-old precedent (Trump v. Slaughter)

→ Killed federal limits on coordinated campaign spending, opening the money floodgates before the midterms (NRSC v. FEC)

→ Let states ban trans athletes from girls' and women's sports

And don't forget: back in April, Louisiana v. Callais already gutted the Voting Rights Act's protections against racial gerrymandering. States have been redrawing maps ever since. That one didn't trend this week, but it will absolutely shape November.

(Also: NPR briefly reported, then retracted, a story that Alito was retiring. False alarm, but it's not hard to see why. The GOP has every incentive to get a young conservative confirmed for life before the midterms could complicate that math.)

Here's what stood out to us most: the Court threw a bone on trans rights and campaign finance the same week it handed down a loss on citizenship. That's not an accident. It's a signal about where the real fight is heading next.

At Planning For Good, we're not interested in watching trans people get used as a bargaining chip in a bigger political game. Not by the Court, not by either party, not by anyone. And we're not interested in our clients making major financial and life decisions without understanding the ground shifting under them.

So here's our ask:

🗳️Vote in the midterms like your rights depend on it, because they do.

🗳️Support candidates who show up for all of us, not ones who trade trans lives for political points.

🗳️And once we win seats, use them: fix voting rights, end gerrymandering, and put real reform on the table for a Court that increasingly answers to politics instead of precedent.

The Court has the power to rule. We have the power to vote them out of relevance.

Let's use it.