If you had told seventeen-year-old Lindsey that one day I would write a book about personal finance, I would have laughed you out of the room. I could have told you a dozen reasons or more why I would never be qualified to give such advice: I’m terrible at calculus; the stock market is confusing; and I’m way too creative to care about such a boring topic. Yet here I am, twenty years later, completely fascinated by money; specifically, how women make, spend, invest, save, and generally feel about cold, hard cash. My teenage self had it all wrong: there’s little to no connection between balancing your bank account and understanding calculus, and you can both be creative and care about making money. (I still think the stock market is complicated, but we’ll get to that later.)