The Silence Tax: When Shame Gets in the Way of Financial Education

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Written by: Terehas Edwards

A better budgeting framework or savings strategy cannot out-math shame. It cannot, by itself, close the gap between where someone is financially and where they hope to be. Before we can talk about improving our finances, we have to acknowledge the shame and insecurity that so many of us carry silently: the things we don’t know about money, the limitations of our financial literacy, the debt we may be too ashamed to disclose, or the questions we are too afraid to ask. Our relationship with money is shaped by generational financial history, cultural expectations, and the lessons, or lack of lessons, we inherited about it. These are the missing pieces in how we should be talking about financial literacy.

According to TIAA, financial literacy in America has reached its lowest level in a decade. The 2026 TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index found that Americans correctly answered just 47% of the survey’s 28 questions on average, the lowest result in the index’s ten-year history. More than a third of Gen Z fell into the lowest knowledge category, and women continued to score below men across nearly every area measured. These findings should renew the call for more education in schools, workplace programs, and stronger financial frameworks. Yet the deeper problem is not simply that people don’t know enough. Many people sitting across from an advisor still won’t pose questions, disclose information, or raise the issues that would benefit them most.

I watched Oprah + Viola: A Netflix Special Event, and Viola Davis’s life story etched itself into me. She described the turmoil and depth of her childhood in poverty. Most notably, she spoke about growing up without the basic knowledge and tools that many people take for granted, the kind of things that can feel like an individual’s survival guide in life. Lessons that other people might have learned as a matter of course, like knowing how to take care of your hygiene or having money for clean clothes, were not guaranteed in her childhood. These were seemingly ordinary lessons she never learned because no one knew them or could teach them to her. When you don’t have someone to teach you, you have to figure things out on your own. When you can’t, the experience can be more than frustrating. It can become shameful.

I replay Viola’s words often because what struck me most wasn’t just the absence of the tools or lessons. It was how that absence became internalized. Davis described feeling ashamed that she didn’t have the tools to figure things out on her own. The missing tool or knowledge became something she experienced as a personal deficiency. That pattern resonated with me because many people experience some version of it with money.

Financial knowledge like zero-based budgeting or dollar-cost averaging isn't something anyone is born with. Someone taught it to them, whether that was a parent, a teacher, or a financial professional. Almost everything we know works this way. No one expects a person to intuitively understand medicine, or law, or how an engine works. Those are specialized fields most of us only touch occasionally, through someone else's expertise. 

Money is different. We interact with it every day, in ways that are personal and constant, so we expect ourselves to understand it already, the way we understand walking or speaking. That gap, between how present money is in our lives and how little most of us were actually taught about it, is where shame enters. I call this the Silence Tax: the cost of confusing a lack of guidance with a personal deficiency, and staying silent instead of asking for help.

Like many, I am very familiar with the impact of the Silence Tax. Early in my career, surrounded by colleagues who were maxing out their 401(k)s or opening HSAs, I felt behind multiple times. Instead of pretending I understood, I started asking questions: How do you do that? Why does it matter? What am I missing? Understanding mattered more to me, and it still does. It’s a big part of what has pulled me toward financial education and planning.

Shame doesn't disappear as wealth increases. I've noticed the same pattern in the wider range of people I've come to know as my career has grown, across every income level. It just changes shape. For someone building wealth for the first time, it can look like not knowing where to start. For a high earner, it can look like making good money but losing control of their spending. For someone who inherited real wealth, it can sound like managing money they never learned to manage while everyone assumes they already know what they’re doing.

The Silence Tax creates a real problem, but also a real opportunity, for advisors. A client who feels ashamed rarely says, “I don’t understand this.” More often, they nod through the meeting and say, “Sounds good,” and quietly delay implementation. A client may also leave a debt or account out of the conversation entirely because admitting it feels like admitting failure. This pattern isn’t necessarily dishonesty. Often, it is self-protection, and self-protection produces incomplete information. An advisor may never even know what’s missing.

We tend to think of the advisor-client relationship as an information exchange in which the client provides the numbers, the advisor applies expertise. But the quality of that exchange depends on something harder to measure, such as whether the client feels safe enough to share openly. A client can hand you every statement and still withhold what matters most if they're afraid of being judged. They may tell you what they own but not how they feel about it, their income but not that they're living beyond it, or that they understand the strategy when they have no idea what you just explained. What looks like a complete financial picture can still be missing the one detail that would have changed the plan.

What’s actually missing in those moments isn’t more disclosure. It’s psychological safety, the sense that admitting what you don’t know will not be met with judgment. Organizational researchers use the term psychological safety to describe why people withhold problems from one another. It applies just as well to clients sitting across from an advisor. An advisor who explains without condescension and makes questions feel normal creates psychological safety. In practice, it can mean treating a client’s silence around a debt, spending habit, family obligation, or investment concern as information to make room for in the planning conversation, not something to move past to get to the financial plan.

As I move through my CFP coursework, I think about this constantly. The technical material matters enormously, but the best plan in the world can’t solve a problem someone is too ashamed to reveal. Financial education shouldn’t be a remedial subject for people who are somehow behind. It’s a fundamental life skill. And people arrive at financial planning with different starting points. Some grew up watching their parents invest. Some watched their parents struggle. Some learned that talking about money was normal. Others learned that money was private, frightening, or never to be discussed. Good planning makes room for those beliefs and experiences because they can shape the way people make financial decisions long before they sit across from an advisor.

The Silence Tax is real and negatively affects individuals by costing them opportunities, time, confidence, and sometimes significant amounts of money. But its greatest cost comes when shame keeps people from ever having the conversation that could have changed their trajectory. That conversation might be as simple as, “I don’t know. Can you explain it to me?” Saying those words is not an admission of failure. It is an invitation to learn.

Related: He Kept Overdrawing His Account. The Real Problem Had Nothing to Do With Self-Control.

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Terehas Edwards is an Associate Advisor and CFP® candidate completing her education through NYU’s Financial Planning Track. Before entering financial planning, she spent ten years leading strategic operations and product program management in the technology industry. She is passionate about behavioral financial education, expanding financial literacy, and helping clients build intentional, healthy relationships with money. Terehas is based in New York City.