Issue #026 — On money, shame, and the conversations we do not have
The silence is the expensive thing. One quarterly conversation, with one trusted person, in which you say true sentences about your actual numbers.
Dear reader,
Money and shame, this letter, because it is February, and the credit-card statements from December have arrived and the conversations we should be having are mostly not happening.
I have come to believe that the silence around money is the single most expensive thing in most people's lives. Not the spending. Not even the under-earning. The silence — the thing that keeps you from telling the one friend you trust what you actually earn, what you actually owe, what the real number in the savings account is. The silence is what locks the situation in place.
I have been on both sides of it. I have under-earned for years and not told anyone, because I was supposed to be doing well. I have, in better years, over-earned in ways that felt vaguely embarrassing in conversations with friends in lower-paid fields, and I have undercut the truth of my situation in those conversations to keep the friendship comfortable. Both versions of the silence are corrosive in different ways. Both versions made the situation harder to change, because nothing you cannot say out loud can really be addressed.
The practice that has made the most difference in my own life is alarmingly simple. It is one money conversation per quarter, with one trusted person, in which I say true sentences about my actual numbers. That is the whole practice. Not a budget. Not a financial planner. Just the conversation, on purpose, with a person.
The first time I did this, I was thirty-one. The conversation was with a friend, eight years older, who had asked me a question I had been dodging. I said the real number. I cried, slightly. The world did not end. The friendship deepened. I came home and looked at my finances with a clearer head than I had in years, because the secret had eaten less of me overnight.
The second person I did this with was my partner. We had been together three years. I had still been, in small ways, performing better-than-I-was. I stopped. The relationship became more honest in ways that radiated past money.
If money is something you carry alone, please consider: who is the one person you could say true sentences to, this quarter, about your actual situation? It does not have to be a financial expert. It only has to be a person who will not flinch.
The silence is the expensive thing. The conversation is, almost always, the cheap thing that begins to fix it.
Yours,
Enova