Issue #027 — Following up on last week's letter, with one correction

Friend,

Following up on last week's letter, with one correction.

I wrote, last time, that the silence around money is the single most expensive thing in most people's lives. A reader replied — kindly — and pointed out a thing I had glossed over.

She said: the silence is expensive only for those who have something they are protecting. For people in genuinely precarious situations, the silence is what makes survival possible. The advice to break the silence assumes a safety net I do not have.

She is right. I want to put the correction here, in writing.

The practice I described — say true sentences about your money to a trusted person — is for people whose silence is a habit, not a defence. If your silence is keeping you safe from a violent partner, an unstable workplace, an extended family that would weaponise the information, the silence is correct. Do not break it because a stranger on the internet wrote a confident letter.

The honest version of the advice is harder to write because it has more conditions. If you have a person who can hear the numbers without using them against you, and you have enough material safety to absorb the conversation going badly, then the silence is probably costing you more than it protects. If those conditions are not met, the silence is doing real work.

I wrote the original letter from inside my own conditions and forgot to name them. That is a class of error I want to be more careful about.

Thank you to the reader who wrote to me. She has agreed to let me share the correction. Future letters will leave room for these corrections at the end, because most letters should.

Yours,
Enova