For most of my adult life until now, I was very busy at being broke and feeling resentful that money had to exist at all.
As a young adult, that allowed me to make choices that were sometimes fun (twice traveling to Europe with only a thousand dollars to my name), sometimes awful (stealing money from work as a teenager), some version of “character-building” (living in my car, skipping meals, dumpster diving), and nearly always financially dreadful (0% savings rate from my mid-teens until mid-thirties).
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When I ate dinner as a child, envelopes with big red letters littered the kitchen table. I did not understand money as anything other than as something which my family did not have. My schoolteachers never said anything about saving. My Boy Scout leaders did not teach me about investing (though I may have skipped that merit badge course for the kayaking one). My high school economics teacher offered nothing in the way of guidance for navigating a world that he said was “ruled by the almighty dollar”.
I am not alone in this.
What’s your relationship to money? How much debt do you carry? How much do you save? What does spending look like for you?
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My mother-in-law once told me that most people would rather walk naked in public than talk about money. Maybe that’s true. Many humans I’ve spoken with begin to glaze over when I mention that, since baby was born, we’ve been living on one income and money’s tight for us right now.
The envelopes don’t have big red letters yet, and they never touch the kitchen table, but as the months slip by, I’m starting to pick and choose what to pay. A few months ago, a dear friend gifted us a month’s rent. It was a precious gift, and just kept us afloat.
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Among many other things, I want to offer my son the education and guidance I did not receive around money and finance—which, I think, begins with my cultivating a healthy, vibrant, and clear relationship to it.
In that spirit, I want to try an experiment: I’m just going to practice talking about money for a minute. Stay with me a few moments?
As a self-employed contractor, I have a skillset that I offer the community for a specific rate, then I make agreements with clients around details. There have been moments that I’ve underbid because I needed the money, then resented the situation and myself for doing so. Other times, I’ve way overbid because I didn’t want the job—which is a common, if ethically questionable, strategy in the trades—only to find out that cost wasn’t a problem, which created a different ethical conundrum…
So, just now I meant to start talking about money, and what I actually did was talk about work, and some struggles I’ve had with it. Isn’t that interesting? I’ve conflated two very different things (a thing I do in order to make something else), then thrown a bunch of luggage on top of it. It’s a bit like rambling on about sex when the baby comes up in conversation.
It seems stupidly basic to state, but money is actually its own thing. That can be confusing for workerbees like me. It’s scary to realize how many hours of my life I’ve traded for something I did not value. And to live in this body, which has been longtermly impacted by the intense work I’ve put it through—in trade for something I often squandered—so many feelings about that.
I’m going to leave it there for now, with a request: make a comment below and tell me something about your relationship to money. It’s okay to be a little vulnerable, wherever you’re at.
Alternatively, I invite you to strike up a conversation with a friend or loved one this week. Ask them about their relationship to money. Where did they learn how to work with it? What stories do they tell themselves? How does that all impact others in their life?
Take care, y’all.
Fatherhood and Money, part i
My wife just finished reading Paco De Leon's book "Finance to the People" and it brought up some great conversations about our individual experiences with money and the psychology of money in general. She shared some of the key takeaways here: https://shagufta.substack.com/p/im-a-writer-and-other-life-discoveries?r=hznf3&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Sounds like that book brought up some good stuff for you and your wife to connect around.
I'll check it out. Thanks!